Girl Afraid
by agoraphobiantic
Summary: Edward moves to Forks with his father during his senior year, where he meets Bella Swan. Gorgeous, confident, and non-malicious hater extraordinaire. She hates Edward, and it's anyone's guess why.
1. Chapter 1

A/N:

Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.

Chapter 1 – First Sight

I gripped the steering wheel of my Volvo too hard and heard my knuckles crack, but just barely. I was grinding my teeth so loud that even my stereo, blaring Incubus, couldn't drown out the rage. What the hell was that girl's _problem_? I'd met a few bitches in my time, but _this_, this was above and beyond anything I'd experienced. Such senseless, meaningless hatred. Such annoying self-righteous attitude. Such gorgeous big brown eyes.

Why oh why did people let her get away with it? Sure, she was pretty, and yeah she was smart. In fact, she was probably hands down the smartest kid at that school. And the prettiest. But was it really about any of her redeeming qualities? Was any bully ever about their redeeming qualities?

I swerved around a grandma in a Buick and ignored her shrieking and honking. My vision tunneled, and I saw red everywhere. Red like her blood would look, smeared across the road, after I ran her over repeatedly. Like she deserved. Oh would that I could... I turned up the music but I could still hear my teeth grinding, my knuckles popping, my blood raging.

Of three things I was absolutely certain.

One: She was out of her fucking mind. She was psychotic, unbalanced and completely deranged. In fact, I was almost certain she was a danger to herself and others.

Two: She had it in for me, for whatever reason. From the moment she'd laid eyes on me, a part of her moved against me, and she was out to make my life a living hell.

And three: I hated Bella Swan.

***

_Earlier…_

***

I gripped the steering wheel of my Volvo and breathed deeply. Slowing my breathing down should not have been this hard. I was no child. I was on the cusp of adulthood, and here I was, hiding in my car, nervous on the first day of school. My first day at a new school. My first day at Forks High. What a fucking joke of a school it was.

My old school in Chicago had been large, sprawling across the grounds in a series of connected buildings, each one a proud pillar of inviting education. This looked like a clump of outhouses hastily done up in boring brick. Through the light drizzle, which hadn't let up since Carlisle and I had arrived three days earlier, I could barely make out the sign for the outhouse that housed the administration. My car, inconspicuous in Chicago, stood out here among the rusty old minivans and older-model mom-cars. One car, a particularly pathetic-looking rusty old Chevy truck, looked like a grandmother car. At least.

Although mostly decrepit, there were a few cars that would have turned heads even in Chicago. A shiny red BMW convertible parked next to an equally shiny red sports jeep. Down the other end of the lot, a mouthwatering Cadillac. Among them, maybe my car wouldn't stand out too much.

I took another deep breath and shook my head. Starting a new school was no big deal. So what if I'd never moved before? No biggie. No one was going to bite me or anything. Nodding to myself, I picked up my keys and stepped out into the drizzle, flipping the hood of my sweater up over my head. Wonderful. Having to always keep your hood up would do awesome things to my hair. Just wonderful.

I walked as fast as I could to the administration outhouse, determined not to jog even though I felt the stares and anticipated the whispers. I didn't hear them. Yet. I was sure I'd hear those soon enough. In a town this small, I was certain a new kid was big news. I'd be the main attraction. I'd be the center of unwanted attention.

Wonderful. Truly.

When I stepped into the building, I was hit with a wave of stifling heat. An unnatural redhead mom-type sat behind a desk dressed in a completely inappropriate sleeveless dress that showed way too much old-lady cleavage. Sure, she needed to turn the heat up to be comfortable in _that_. I gritted my teeth as I stepped to the desk and cleared my throat.

I didn't even get a word out.

"Edward Cullen, right?" she smiled at me, and there was lipstick on her teeth. I nodded and told myself not to stare. I told myself not to laugh. "We've been expecting you. Welcome to Forks!" She picked up a sheet of paper and placed it in front of me, leaning forward and showing me even more of her cleavage. Seriously. Wrong. "I'm Mrs. Cope. If you need anything, please stop by anytime and ask. Anything at all." Ugh. Double intendre. Nasty. "Here's your schedule, your locker combination, and here's a map of the school. You think you'll get around okay?" I nodded again. She smiled, and I hesitantly smiled back. I felt violated. "Your locker is marked on the map, you should have no trouble finding it. Here's your slips. Be sure to get them signed by all your teachers and bring them back by the end of the day. I'll be here waiting."

"Thanks," I muttered, immediately turning around to leave with my stack of papers. She was leaning forward again, and really, I had seen more than enough. As I stepped through the door back outside, I thought I heard her giggle. GIGGLE. Jesus.

Out in the damp I stared at the map she'd given me. Did she seriously draw a _heart _to mark my locker? Really? I shook my head. Crazy small town horny moms. You hear about them, but you never expect it to be so bad. Memorizing the locations of my first three classes, I stuffed everything into my bag and trudged to Spanish. With my luck, this Mrs. Goff would be just as horny as Cope. With my luck, she'd give me special after school assignments. With my luck, I'd become a victim of statutory rape within the week. Just watch.

Once I got inside the right building – another outhouse – I pushed back the hood of my sweater and tried to shake my hair back to life. Without a mirror, I had no idea what the damage was like, and finding a bathroom to fix my hair sounded pink even in my head. I took a deep breath and hoped for the best. Hopefully the whispering was new-kid syndrome, not a reflection on the state of my hair. I walked down the hall and pretended not to hear it, tried to melt into the rest of the student body, but it was proving impossible when I was almost a head taller than most of the guys around here. Was the stunted growth a syndrome or some serious retardation in this town? Was something wrong with the water in Forks? Where was Erin Brockovich when you needed her?

I double checked the room number outside the class before entering and quickly stepped up to the teacher's desk and cleared my throat. She looked up from her novel – Danielle Steele – and smiled at me. "Edward Cullen?"

"Yes. I've been asked to have these signed by all my teachers." I presented my slip, and she took it without taking her eyes off my face.

"My pleasure." She scribbled her name on the bottom of the slip and handed it back, still smiling. "Please take that seat over there by Lauren. She's the blonde one in the red blouse." I nodded and smiled politely before turning around to find the desk she'd indicated.

Luckily, it was near the back. The girl sitting at the desk next to it, blonde Lauren in the red blouse, turned to eye me with open curiosity, and the girl she had been leaning across the aisle to chatter with had stopped to do the same. When did staring stop being rude? I slid into my seat and tried not to sigh as she continued to stare unblinkingly at me. She whispered to the girl and they giggled behind their hands before she finally leaned towards me, flipping her waist-length hair. When I didn't look up and meet her eyes, she surprised me by reaching out and touching my shoulder.

I turned to face her, shocked. Did the concept of personal space mean anything to this girl?

"You're Edward, right?" She left her hand on my shoulder, and I stifled a snarl. "I'm Lauren. This is Jessica," she gestured to the giggling girl next to her. "If you need anything, let us know, yeah?"

I nodded at her. "Sure. Yeah."

As the teacher finally called the class to attention, Lauren took her hand away and started furiously exchanging notes with Jessica. I had the inexplicable urge to dust off my shoulder where she'd touched me, but that would have been inexcusably rude. Maybe these small town hicks were uncivilized, but I sure as hell wasn't going to start grunting and scratching my crotch just yet.

The class went on forever, luckily with no introduction of me at all. The Spanish they were learning was so basic, I'd learned most of it back in middle school. I allowed myself the liberty of not paying any attention to the conjugation of irregular verbs. Already, I knew this was going to be a long day.

***

After Spanish, Lauren and Jessica offered to walk me to my next class. I accepted, only because I still wasn't ready to grunt and scratch my crotch. They chattered at me excitedly, offering up bits of gossip and the "cool hangouts," all the way until I was outside my history class. Finally, they left me alone, and I again went through the routine of getting my slip signed and finding a seat. Again, the material was elementary, and again I let my mind wander. I was terribly bored. So bored, I wanted to sleep in the worst way.

History went into English, where we read the excitingly underexposed tale of Romeo and Juliet, and English was followed by gym. Wonderful. Fucking wonderful.

I'd been something of an athlete back in Chicago, but the state of the gym was so pathetic, I knew immediately I wouldn't be trying out for any teams here. Everyone around me seemed short and scrawny, except for a shaggy blond guy with dazed eyes who was about my height, and a mammoth of some sort standing next to him. They were whispering loudly, occasionally guffawing as the class started picking up tennis rackets and pairing into teams. The bear-man next to the blond guy was swinging his racket like a baseball bat, and his entire body seemed to quiver with every swing. He was big. Forget it, he was fucking huge.

The coach was walking around the gym, pairing people into teams of doubles, until he got to where the bear-man was standing. "Whitlock, McCarty, square off against Cheney and…" he paused, looking around for a candidate for Cheney's partner. Cheney, an extremely short non-athletic type, looked like he was about to wet himself.

"New kid!" the coach growled, and I winced. Was that really necessary? Like I didn't already have every pair of eyes glued on me. "Come over here and pair up with Cheney." At this, the large bear-man grinned cockily, waggling his eyebrows at me. I sighed with as much patience as I could muster and picked up my racket reluctantly.

"No need to pout, pretty boy," he bellowed across the court at me. Again, I winced. "I promise not to hit you in the face… well, not too hard anyway." He laughed then, twirling his racket and shaking his head at his own joke.

"Go easy on the new kid, Em," the shaggy blond drawled at him, his eyes still looking pretty dazed. Was he fucking stoned? No way. The bear-man grinned at him, then turned back to face me. My eyes lingered on the blond. I noticed up close what I'd failed to see from across the gym. His left arm was covered in scars, and a fair bit of his face and neck as well on that side. It made him look menacing, even with the unfocused blue eyes.

"Go on, princess. Do your worst." Well, bear-man wasn't subtle, that was for sure.

I ground my teeth, shaking my head a little. Cheney whimpered next to me, and I gave him a withering look. My ears were ringing, a sure sign I was starting to get angry. There was no sense in letting myself get worked up because of the childish taunts of the missing link in the chain of evolution. Bear-man wanted me to do my worst? Well, he asked for it.

Tossing the ball lightly, I put on a worried face, frowning a little as I took an imperfect stance. He grinned wider. Taking a deep breath, I tossed the ball, reached back…

My serve was impeccable. I wasn't sure what I enjoyed most. The satisfying thwack of the ball against my racket, the brief look of shock on bear-man's face as he realized what was coming his way, or the roar of pain and the crunch of bone when it connected with his face. Maybe it was the pleasing shade of red dribbling down his nose as he blinked at the ceiling with clouded eyes. Yeah. Probably that was the best part.

For a moment, no one moved. Shocked faces stared in awe at the mighty troll on his back, and several threw their hands over their mouths, as though to stifle laughter. The coach blew his whistle, belatedly realizing what had happened, and jogged over to the fallen bear-man. "McCarty! How many fingers am I holding up?"

But bear-man wasn't looking at his fingers. He sat up shakily, his eyes focusing – with difficulty – on my face. Cheney whimpered again. McCarty's mouth and chin were covered in blood, and he suddenly looked extremely dangerous. The bulk of his arms, the breadth of his shoulders, the veins popping out on the sides of his neck. Uh-oh.

But then the bear-man shocked me and the coach – and apparently the rest of the losers in the class – and threw his head back to roar with laughter. There was a distinct nasal quality to it, and I figured his nose was probably broken. It should have been hurting like hell, but he didn't seem to notice until he started coughing violently and spat blood by his feet. He grinned at me then, his teeth stained red, looking more menacing than ever and said the least expected thing to me.

"I like you, kid! That was a _good _shot!"

I blinked at him once. I blinked at him twice. His grin was unchanged but his shoulders were shaking again with silent laughter. I shook my head and smiled. I couldn't help myself.

***

"No one usually plays against Emmet," the blond, Jasper, was saying to me later. It was lunch, and we were sitting in the cafeteria waiting for "the girls," Jasper had said. Across from me, the bear-man wolfed down his meal as though the cafeteria had served him heaven on a platter. "He plays rougher than most, and none of them have much of a sense of humor about it." He smiled lazily at me, and I wondered if he always looked so sleepy. The droopy eyelids combined with the slow Southern drawl felt like a caricature. "Emmet likes humor."

As though on cue, Emmet reached over and smacked Jasper on the back, causing him to nearly slide off his chair and into the table. "Damn right, I like humor. People that take themselves too seriously are boring as fuck."

I raised an eyebrow at his colorful language, but nodded my agreement. "You have a point, I guess."

He snorted and winced, touching his nose lightly. "Of course I have a point. You have humor, don't you, Ed? I mean, no one without humor would ever whack me in the face. And on their first fucking day in a new fucking school. I mean seriously, it's either humor or a death wish." He laughed again, grimacing at the pain and laughing at it at the same time. He was definitely fucking something up in there.

"Ah, and here come the girls now," Jasper said suddenly, leaning back in his chair and waving to someone over my head. Curious, I turned around, and that was the first time I saw her.

She was wearing a ratty blue sweater over faded cut-off jeans, her feet jammed unceremoniously into battered looking sneakers, and apparently no socks. Her hair was a billowy wavy brown mess, and she was so pale I was certain I'd see her internal organs if I held her up to the sun. Nothing about her was anything like the girls back in Chicago. She looked ordinary, absolutely and utterly ordinary, especially next to the exceptionally cute girl she was walking with. But as she came closer to the table, her chin held up, her hips hypnotic in the kinetics of her strut, I had to swallow. Confidence, certainty, and a strange sense of power emanated from her very skin, spilling out of her pores and filling the space around her with a heady sense of inferiority. She was listening with a small smile to the cute girl that was chattering by her side, her eyes not really focused on her face at all. It was almost as though she was imagining she were somewhere else.

My body reacted to her instantly, to be quite honest. She was gorgeous, and she was strong. I could tell straight away that this was a girl who got what she wanted and didn't take 'no' for an answer. I could tell straight away she was different. Lauren had been almost brazen in her confidence this morning, but the confidence that radiated out of this girl was on a completely different level. It was confidence born of true strength, not false vanity. It was genuine. I wanted her.

Then she got to the table, and she saw me. She opened her mouth, and the first words I ever heard her say were, "What the fuck happened to your nose, Em?"

For a moment, I was confused. My nose? Wait, she wasn't talking to me. Emmet leaned back in his chair, offering her a goofy grin though she was still looking at me. "Cullen here smashed it in during gym, using nothing but a tennis ball and a surprisingly good arm."

She raised her perfectly arched eyebrows, finally looking away from me to offer a bored half-smile to Emmet. "Quite the compliment coming from you." She slid into a chair just as the small girl she had been talking to plopped herself in Jasper's lap.

"I'm Alice," she sang at me, really and truly SANG at me. "I totally forgot the new kid was coming in today, or I totally would've thrown you a proper greeting. So you're Edward Cullen at last! The school's been going on and on about you for the past few days, I thought I was gonna puke if I had to hear all about you for another day before I got to actually see you! Don't think I'm a stalker or anything like that, though, I just get so curious about things, and people here get so fixated on their gossip. I mean, wow, once a topic becomes interesting to them, it's like that thing with the horse and the bit in its mouth. I never got that really, but it's exactly like that with these people. I'm sure within the week you'll know all about it anyway, so there's no point in me telling you now I guess," and on and on.

She didn't even seem to pause for breath. I was stunned speechless by the sheer capacity of her lungs as she continued in the same vein until Jasper finally silenced her with a quiet but teasing, "Babe, breathe."

And then she actually did. She took in huge gulps of air and smiled gratefully at Jasper.

"Edward, this is my girlfriend, Alice. Alice, Edward." I nodded and smiled weakly at the little girl, who waved enthusiastically at me while concentrating on her breathing. So simple. Why couldn't he have done that sooner? "That's Bella over there with the 'tude." She smiled half-heartedly, but it tugged at something in my chest. Bella. The name suited her somehow, more than a name like 'Lauren' or 'Jessica' would have. "There's Rosalie, too. She's Emmet's girl, but she always runs late for lunch because she does the student council meetings right after her class."

I tore my eyes away from Bella's face to nod at Jasper, and was just about to open my mouth when Alice seemed to decide she had breathed enough for now.

"So Edward, is it true that you moved here from Chicago? And is your dad really a doctor? I heard they were making him the head of the entire hospital here at Forks. Mr. Banner said he'd be the youngest head the hospital's ever had, too. I bet he's really smart. You know how some people are like so smart without even trying that they like become chess champions and stuff by the time they're like ten years old? I think it's tough being that smart, and people might make you go to college when you're supposed to be in junior high, so you're the youngest kid in college and you don't make any friends because they all resent you so much. I think if Jasper and I ever had really smart kids, we'd leave them be," and on and on and on. I snuck a glance at Bella, but she was having a quiet conversation with Emmet. His brow was furrowed and his eyes became very small. He looked like he was thinking, and it looked like it was taking every last bit of his energy.

"What the _fuck_?!" The shriek stunned the cafeteria – including, miraculously, Alice – into momentary silence, and I turned to see that the source of the ungodly sound was a surreal blonde vision in designer heels and a skirt too short to actually hide anything. She was staring open-mouthed at Emmet, who gulped loudly.

"Baby, it's not as bad as it looks. I promise, the nurse said it'll heal completely, and there won't be any scarring!"

The blonde hurtled herself across the cafeteria as fast as her ridiculously high heels could take her and Emmet got up to catch her as she threw herself into his arms, kissing his face and murmuring, "My poor baby!"

The idea of bear-man as a baby was painfully hilarious, and I was formulating a witty remark to that effect when suddenly, Bella spoke again. "Edgar here smashed Emmet's face in with a tennis ball."

The blonde stopped kissing Emmet's face to turn and glare at me, but I had no eyes for her. My eyes were on Bella's face, as she again presented me with a bored smile. Her eyes, however, were glittering with rage. Fury. She was angry with me. I could see it in the twitching of her right eyelid, and the way her hand, casually resting on the tabletop, was clenched so tight the veins were sticking out over her knuckles.

The bell rang like some sort of saving grace, and I turned back to the blonde to see her face – had I really called her a vision? – ugly with her anger. I realized by the expectant silence that she had spoken to me, but I couldn't have figured out what she'd said if my life depended on it. The way she was looking at me, I wondered if maybe it did.

"Rosie, baby, chill. The kid's cool. Come on, let me walk you to class." Emmet shot me an apologetic smile as he led the blonde away by the hand, and Jasper sighed in exasperation.

"What the fuck, Bella? You know how Rosalie gets when it comes to Emmet. You could've found a better way to tell her about it."

Bella, still seated, shrugged and rolled her eyes. "Whatever, Jazz. Since when was it my job to babysit newbie here?" She smiled at me again, and I began to develop an intense dislike for the expression. "Besides, I'm sure Edgar wasn't afraid of_Rosalie_." She rolled her eyes again as though at a ridiculous thought, then got up and swaggered out of the cafeteria. The way Rosalie had looked, maybe it wasn't so ridiculous.

"She's not usually like that," Alice sang at me. "She's really usually way cool. She's probably just PMSing or something. You know I heard it was a myth that women get bitchier because of hormones when they PMS, but it's like they trick themselves into being bitches as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, and that it's just a cultural-"

"Let's get to class, Al," Jasper interrupted, and she immediately stopped talking to smile and nod eagerly at him. The girl needed a horse-tranquilizer. And Jasper needed a fucking medal. Or a lobotomy of some sort.

When I walked into biology, I cringed as I realized the class had already started. The teacher nodded at me. "Edward Cullen?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why don't you have a seat and I'll sign your form after class?"

I nodded, grateful that my rock star status as the new kid was letting me get away with it this time. I ducked my head and made my way towards the back, taking the only empty seat in the class next to – you've GOT to be fucking kidding me.

Bella sat at the table that apparently she had previously enjoyed alone, and she glared at me as I approached. I gulped. She looked like she was considering seriously hurting me. And not in the fun way.

She turned around to look outside the window, and again, her hand resting on the table was clenched into a fist. I slid into my seat – fucking great, this is where I was sitting for the rest of the year it would seem like – and pushed her books over to her side of the table since clearly she wasn't going to go out of her way to make me feel welcome.

"Mr. Cullen, I understand you may be a little lost since we're well into the semester, but you'll have to find the time to catch up. We're working on labs next class, and you and Miss Swan will have to team up as lab partners. I'm sure she'll be willing to answer any questions you have beyond that." With a satisfied nod, he turned to the rest of the class and began his lecture. Next to me, Bella had stiffened at the mention of being my lab partner. She turned to glare at me in a way that told me in no uncertain terms how unwelcome I was to ask her any questions. I frowned at her and her cheeks turned red. Was she blushing? She whipped her head around and stared out the window, ignoring me completely, and I felt like she'd reached out and slapped me instead.

The lesson droned on, and when I turned my attention briefly to it, I realized it was all stuff I'd studied before. Classes at Forks High weren't exactly the most challenging aspect of the move. But the townsfolk were ridiculous. So far I'd met the horny molester lady in the office, bear-man in gym, the energizer-bunny that was Alice, and the cherry on the sundae of fucked up, Bella Swan. Who was fucking hot. And who seemed to hate me. For no reason.

I stole a glance at her and saw her still tense. She flipped her hair so that it covered her profile and hid her from my view. She was hiding from me? She wasn't even breathing! That couldn't be healthy. I thought back to our brief exchanges in the cafeteria. Could they even be called exchanges? We'd barely spoken to one another. Who could ever manage to have a conversation with Alice there? Did the girl have a fucking off switch and where the fuck was it?

I pushed the thought of her away and tried to focus again. Nothing I had said to her – I hadn't said anything to her at all – could have possibly offended her. Nothing. I knew I didn't smell bad. Edward Cullen has never smelled bad a day in his life. I ran my fingers through my hair, frustrated with this girl who was making me question my every little action. What was her problem anyway? I was unused to this kind of reaction in a girl I hadn't rejected.

The bell rang after an eternity, and she was out of her seat so fast I had to blink away the after image. Without looking at me once, she grabbed her books and stomped out of the class, her arrogant swagger completely gone. I shook my head. Totally crazy.

"My heart goes out to you." I looked up to see the girl from this morning, Lauren, smiling at me with an exaggerated expression of sympathy on her face. She was turned around in her seat. I hadn't even realized she'd been sitting in front of me the entire class.

"Why?" I asked, wary.

She jerked her head at the door and swung her bag over her shoulder. "You got stuck with Psycho Bella for a lab partner. There's just no way that can be pleasant."

I raised my eyebrows, but suddenly I was hungry for information about this girl. The way Lauren was eyeing my chest, I knew she wasn't just being friendly, but I also knew that maybe this once, I could use it to my advantage. "Psycho Bella? Is that her nickname around here?"

Lauren shrugged and walked beside me as we headed slowly out the door. "Sort of. She's kind of wild. I mean, in middle school she was totally normal. Maybe a little quiet and serious, but otherwise okay, you know? But then in like sophomore year she totally flipped out. We were just sitting around having lunch and she exploded, started throwing shit everywhere and yelling at Jasper. You know Jasper, the blond guy with the shaggy hair?" I nodded. "Well they were inseparable, so it was kinda freaky to see her go off on him like that. When he went out to his car after school that day she was beating the shit out of it with a baseball bat. Totally psycho." She shuddered delicately and I felt my eyes go wide. Psycho indeed. "Ever since she's been doing that kind of shit all the time. If anyone pisses her off, she goes after them. This one girl called her a bitch to her face, and the next day there was a dead cat in her locker. No joke."

"Telling tales, Mallory?"

Lauren's face turned ashen so fast, I worried for her health. She turned to look over her shoulder at the one who'd spoken the words and struck fear so easily into Lauren's frail little heart. "Not at all, Bella. Why would you think that?"

Bella's face contorted into a vicious grin, terrifying and menacing and evil in the basest sense of the word. "I'll see you later." And she turned and walked away. Lauren looked like she was about to wet herself, or give herself an aneurysm, or do both and be done with it.

She shook her head after a few moments and gave me a shaky laugh. "Well, there you have it. So what class do you have next?"

The act that she was perfectly fine and completely unaffected by Bella Swan's brief display of covert hostility was pathetic to use the kindest of terms. I tried to smile reassuringly at Lauren. Courage! "Calculus. Perfect way to end the day, don't you think?"

She nodded, seemingly distracted, and started walking away, offering a brief wave over her shoulder as her eyes scanned the hallways nervously.

I raised my eyebrows at this. It seemed like bad high school drama to me, the gossip and the apparent dislike the girls had for one another clearly linked somehow. But even if it wasn't true, Lauren's story said a little something about what kind of person this Psycho Bella really was. Mean. Cruel. Maybe even a little dangerous? She certainly looked that way when she'd grinned like that. It wasn't until I walked into my next and last class and saw the teacher that I realized I hadn't gotten my slip signed for biology. Fuck it, I'd go back at the end of the school day.

Calculus went by in a blur, and I spent it twirling my pen and thinking over this new information I'd gathered on Bella Swan. That the girl was unbalanced seemed obvious enough, even without Lauren's 90210 input. The question then was just _how _unbalanced was she really? Because smashing up cars and sticking dead cats in lockers – not to mention where she got the dead cat, or if she had killed it herself even – was beyond unbalanced. It was terrifying. I remembered the power and confidence of her stride in the cafeteria and thought that maybe when it came to this girl, the idea wasn't so far-fetched. The thought made me shudder.

Clearly, she hated me. For whatever reason. Was I next? Would I find a dead house pet in my locker? Would I go out to the parking lot and find my beloved Volvo a ruined mess? The idea made my gut clench, and I tapped my foot impatiently until the end of class.

Finally. I shot out of my seat and shifted my weight impatiently from one foot to the other as the teacher signed my slip. I would run to the biology lab later, but I had to check on my car first.

Ignoring the strange looks, I ran out of the building and around the field to the parking lot, and breathed a sigh of relief as I saw my Volvo was as pristine as it had been when I'd gotten here this morning. Feeling silly, I shook my head and jogged back to the building where I had biology.

In the face of my undamaged car, I started to feel more than just silly. I felt ridiculous. Sure, the girl seemed to have an attitude problem, but aside from the gossip of one teenage girl she'd shown no sign that she was at all 'psycho'. My imagination had run away with me, and probably the jitters of the first day at school had gotten my mind running in funny circles. She probably didn't even hate me at all. That tension may have been anything, and it was very likely magnified to unrealistic proportions in my mind because of how nervous she made me. Not because she was scary, but because she was attractive, and I was always nervous around girls I was attracted to. My palms got sweaty, and I got very quiet. Probably she had thought I was weird and nothing else.

I was feeling much more relaxed by this logical rationalization by the time I got to the class, but as soon as I looked into the room I didn't want to go in there anymore.

She was standing with her back turned to me, so she didn't see me. In a sweet pleading voice I hadn't heard her use before, she was arguing with the teacher, who also didn't notice my presence there. "I just think that I work better alone, I've always worked better alone. You know I'm at a much more advanced level than most of my peers, and having to sit next to someone that isn't as familiar with the material as I am might hold me back. Doesn't that seem a little unreasonable, Mr. Banner?"

But the teacher was shaking his head and sighing tiredly. "I know you're ahead of your classmates, Bella, and I wish there was something I could do, but there aren't any other seats left, and now that we have an even number of students again, you and Mr. Cullen will just have to make the best of it and work together."

She was trying to get out of working with me. Seriously, what was her _deal_? It couldn't be about me, she didn't know me at all. Feeling angry and annoyed with her, I cleared my throat loudly. Immediately, her shoulders stiffened, and she turned around to glare at me. "Thank you for your time, Mr. Banner," she growled, no longer pleading or sweet, as she brushed past me and left the class.

"Your slip, Mr. Cullen?" I nodded at the teacher, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from the place where she'd just disappeared down the hall. The girl was psycho. Forget about it. As I dropped my books off at my locker I thought of a slew of things I wanted to say to her, choice words about her apparent rudeness and bad manners.

But when I got to the parking lot after I dropped all my slips at the office, the only cars left were my Volvo and the big red truck.

She must have already gone home.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N:

Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.

Chapter 2 – "Dead Fish"

I heard Carlisle come home past midnight, but I didn't get up out of bed, turn down the music or go out to greet him. Radiohead bounced around my room, filling every inch of space with the sounds that I had hoped would drown out the day I had. I heard Carlisle knock on my door. "Son? Are you up?" I didn't answer. He eventually went away and I rolled over in my bed.

I hated Forks. I'd only been here for a day but I already hated it. The people were crazy, everyone was out of their goddamned minds. I was angry with Carlisle for moving us here. I didn't want to face him.

The album repeated itself three times before I finally fell asleep.

***

The next morning I found myself sitting in my Volvo again, not wanting to get out and face the school. I took deep breaths again, reminding myself it wasn't so bad. All in my head. Bella Swan had better things to do than hate me. I was sure that her attempt to get out of being my lab partner was just as she'd claimed. She worked better alone and didn't want me to hold her back. I'd work hard and show her she wouldn't have to worry about it. I was ahead of my peers, too.

I got out of the car and almost immediately was assaulted by Jasper. "Edward, man, I didn't think you'd make it out of the car for a minute there."

I made a face. "I wasn't in there that long."

Jasper snorted, and I thought he was choking before I realized he was laughing. He stuffed his hands into his jacket pocket and presented me with a pack of clove cigarettes. Nasty. "You were in there so long, Alice was worried you'd died of monoxide poisoning."

I shook my head at his cloves and he shrugged and stuck one between his lips. He offered me a flask instead, and I raised my eyebrows. I snuck a mouthful. Cheap scotch. At least it took the edge off the morning, I thought as I handed it back. "Where is Alice, anyway?" In a room with soft walls, I hoped.

He took a mouthful of the scotch for himself then jerked his head back towards the woods on the edge of the parking lot. "She and Bella are having their morning tokes. Emmet is in his Jeep with Rosalie." He gestured to the giant red jeep that couldn't have been more Emmet if his face had been plastered on its side. As I watched, the windows fogged up. Lovely.

Looking into Jasper's eyes I realized he must have had his morning tokes already. I said nothing, but couldn't resist the urge to smile and shake my head at him.

He smiled back, and I wondered if he had read my mind. Or maybe he was just too stoned to care why I was amused. "You toke, Edward?"

I shrugged, pulling out my Luckies. "Not too often."

Jasper shook his head and chuckled, snorting again as he produced a lighter and lit up. "In Forks, you'll need it, man. It's un-fucking-bearable. When my folks moved out here, I was twelve, and I thought for sure I was being punished. I begged them to send me to boarding school. If it weren't for Bella and hash, I probably would've lost my mind."

I accepted his lighter and lit my own cigarette, thinking about this. Something Lauren had told me the day before seemed to correspond with this. "You and Bella are close?"

Jasper nodded, looking thoughtful. He seemed to hesitate as he debated saying something, then shook his head and smiled a watery smile at me.

"So how long has it been for you and Alice?" It felt like talking about Bella wasn't something Jasper was willing to do, so I automatically went with the mandatory questions of early friendship.

Apparently, it was the right question, because Jasper's face lit up at the mention of her name, and his eyes became slightly more lucid. "Two years. I was just getting out of a pretty serious relationship, and Alice just came right up to me exactly fourteen days after it ended and asked if an appropriate time had passed and if I were ready to start dating again. I told her I wasn't really, and she just nodded and came back fourteen days later. The third time, I gave in and we went out. The rest is history, like they say."

I nodded and processed this. It was easy to imagine. Alice as the song that never ends, Jasper as the dazed listener too stoned to get over the novelty of it. Match made in heaven. We smoked together silently after that, and the bell rang just as Alice came racing through the bushes, launching herself into Jasper's arms. Dang, she was tiny. Immediately, she began singing at Jasper, and I tried my best to reduce her voice to a high-pitched buzz. This would be a useful skill if I was going to be spending time with Jasper, which I had a feeling I would want to do. He seemed cool enough.

Bella came stumbling after her, and for a moment I thought she was going to fall. She caught herself on the hood of a green Honda and giggled, shaking her head until she looked up and saw me.

She was dressed in a pair of worn jeans, and her sneakers again, but she had on this blue blouse that made her skin look… luminous. Her hair looked messier today, like she'd been running her fingers through it, and as if on cue she ran her fingers through it now, looking at me with clear distaste. She made no move to come towards us, instead turning around to the building and heading inside one of the outhouses. Unbelievable.

The doors of the Jeep were being slammed shut, and Rosalie was glaring at me too. Jeez, what a morning. And classes hadn't even started yet. She marched off with a toss of her blonde hair, her heels clicking angrily as she went and Emmet rumbled with laughter that I realized must be quiet for him. "What a woman."

He clapped me on the shoulder when he reached us, and I took a moment to appreciate the dark circles under his eyes that were the result of a blunt force trauma to the nose. He seemed to read my mind and roared with laughter, which I responded to by shaking my head and smiling again. Truly unbelievable. Alice didn't shut up, and her voice only disappeared when she and Jasper were out of earshot.

In Spanish class, Lauren chattered at me incessantly, and I tried my best to remain polite and not brush her off. She was making it quite the task. Were all Forks girls this mindless?

In gym class, Cheney stood back and let me play Emmet while Jasper hung out to the side trying to balance his tennis racket on his forehead. We got a couple good shots at one another, and I was now sporting several ball-sized bruises on my chest and arms. Shockingly enough, I was starting to enjoy myself.

It wasn't until we started walking towards the cafeteria for lunch that I started tensing up again. I berated myself mentally. It was ridiculous really, being so tense about a little girl. I could say with a fair amount of conviction that whatever nervousness resulting from my attraction to her was good and gone now. But the memory of her big brown eyes filled with hate, directed at me, clearly wishing I was elsewhere – or better yet, dead – made me suppress a shudder. I stepped into the cafeteria bracing myself for a hammer blow, but blinked when I realized we were among the first students to enter.

Of course. The gym class let out early to give us time to clean up and change. We'd be here first. It'd been the same the day before. I tried not to look over my shoulder too much as I sat and picked at the food on my tray. I didn't know why I even bothered to get anything. Emmet was stuffing his face with every sign of enjoyment, but Jasper had his hands wrapped contentedly around a juice box, the straw between his teeth, his eyes glazed and unfocused. Next time, I told myself, I take the Jasper route.

Alice squealed excitedly and bounced her way over to Jasper, who dropped his juice box immediately to accept her on his lap. I stiffened my shoulders and refused to turn around and see Bella approach. Still, I felt her coming all the same, like some strange magnetic field, and it made me too tense to move for a while.

"You're in my fucking seat, Edgar."

I blinked and turned my head to see her standing next to my seat, one hand in her pocket while the other deposited her bag at her feet. "Excuse me?"

"I said," she repeated in a sickly sweet voice, "you're in my fucking seat, Edgar."

I looked to Jasper for some kind of sign that this was a bad joke, but he and Alice had somehow glued their faces together. I looked to Emmet, and he paused in his eating to shrug at me. "I guess it kinda is. She always sits there."

I looked back up at her and she looked triumphant. It was so fucking juvenile, I didn't know if it was all a joke to her. All the same, I wasn't going to let her get to me. "That's fair," I smiled at her, my most charming, dazzling smile, and her expression faltered for a moment. "Allow me."

I stood up and held the chair out for her, maintaining my smile. She looked at me suspiciously and hesitantly lowered herself into it, letting me slide it back into the table for her. When she was seated, I pulled my tray to her left and took the seat next to hers. She continued to glare at me, but I was determined to be nice to her.

"Aren't you hungry?" I asked, noting the absence of her tray for the second day in a row.

She folded her arms and pouted, and if she was a normal girl I would have told her how fucking adorable that looked. But she wasn't so I didn't. "Cafeteria food is the scum from the bottom of the barrel's droppings. I refuse to touch the stuff."

She bit her lip suddenly and glared at me with renewed vigor, as though angry at me for tricking her into talking to me. She turned her head and deliberately looked away, at anyone and anything but me. Clearly, she thought the conversation was over.

I'm not sure why I said it, but suddenly I wanted to. In the worst way. "I heard a rumor about a dead cat in a locker, involving you somehow."

Alice's chatter stopped, and everyone at the table was staring at me open-mouthed. I immediately wanted to take it back, but instead I concentrated on looking at Bella, keeping my face politely interested and passively curious. Fucking word vomit.

"Dead cat?" Jasper scratched his chin and leaned back in his chair. Alice was fidgeting in his lap. "I thought it was a dead rat."

Emmet shook his head. "I heard it was a dead pigeon. Only the thing'd been dead for a while even before it got stuck in the locker, so it was rotting and smelly as hell and there were maggots all over it."

Alice shuddered delicately and Bella actually growled. "It was a fish, and it was from my dad's fishing trip. Jeez, I pulled it out of the freezer and thought it would be funny. Haven't any of you fuckers ever seen 'The Godfather'? And you guys all know it was a fish! You were there! The school smelled like fish for a week. Where the fuck would I get a dead cat?"

"What dead cat?" Rosalie leaned over Emmet and planted a kiss on his forehead, causing him to grin like an idiot. She sat beside him, draping her arm over his shoulder and looked at Bella with curiosity. Her brow furrowed when she noticed everyone's expression.

"Edward heard a rumor about Bella and a dead cat," Alice started, and I saw her preparing to launch into one of her epic monologues before Rosalie expertly cut her off.

"That's silly. I clearly remember it being a dead rabbit."

Jasper and Emmet burst into laughter simultaneously, and Alice giggled like a sociopathic child. Bella put her hands flat on the table and tried to look upset, but I saw the corners of her lips twitch as she fought a smile. I let myself join the laughter, chuckling quietly and shaking my head. She glared at me and I stopped, but couldn't completely hide my smile. What a strange and frightening girl.

"I heard this story once about a guy who ordered a bucket from KFC and got a rabbit instead of chicken. Apparently he like sued for a gajillion dollars and used the money to buy an animal farm and now he's got stock in like the biggest meat suppliers in the country. Isn't it kind of ironic and really sick how that works sometimes? I mean, what is the world coming to when-" I tuned Alice out - it was getting easier. I tried to pretend I didn't notice the way Emmet and Rosalie were wrapped around each other. Holy crap, I could see their tongues! Bella sat in the same position, her shoulders slouched and her hands spread flat on the table, her eyes focused on a seemingly random spot on Emmet's tray. I debated starting another conversation with her, but just as I turned to her with a topic in mind she got up and slung her bag over her shoulder, leaving the cafeteria without a second glance. The bell rang almost ten minutes later, causing Alice to stop talking and Rosalie and Emmet to disengage from one another.

Emmet, Rosalie and I lingered after Jasper and Alice left, discussing a potential scrabble night for that weekend. I said I'd see, because the thought of spending my weekend, any part of my weekend, in the company of Bella was horrifying.

Rosalie allowed my flimsy promise while Emmet insisted we continue this conversation later. I assured him we would and hurried to biology, hoping to make it before the late bell this time. I wasn't putting on a very good track record at this rate…

But I needn't have worried because when I stepped into the class, no one even turned to look at me. This in and of itself would have shocked me considering new-kid syndrome hadn't had enough time to wear off yet, but more importantly, the attention of the entire class, teacher included, was on the table Bella and I hatefully shared, where Lauren was standing with her fists clenched, tears streaming down her face. And who should be eyeing her with that same bored smile that I now definitely hated, but Bella herself.

"Ladies, please, I'm going to have to ask you to conduct yourselves," the teacher was pleading – no joke, pleading – in a desperate attempt to regain control of the class.

Bella turned to him, and her smile became slightly wider. "I have no problem conducting myself, Mr. Banner. It seems that Lauren is overly emotional though. Maybe she could use some cooling off."

"You fucking bitch!" And she launched herself at Bella at almost the same instant that the rest of the class lunged itself across the room to gather around the catfight.

The teacher stood for a series of delayed moments with his mouth hanging open, and even over the shouted encouragements of the rest of the class and Lauren screaming obscenities I could hear her, clear as a bell, laughing. Lauren suddenly screeched and I moved to the crowd without thinking. Pushing my way through the spectators, I finally made my way to the two girls and almost stopped and gaped at them. Bella had Lauren by the hair at the nape of her neck, and was pressing her face against the linoleum floor. Lauren was sporting a blooming bruise on her right cheek, and Bella's face was covered in shallow scratch marks. But I didn't gape. I reached out and grabbed Bella by the shoulder, and she let out an indignant yelp as I pulled her off of Lauren and restrained her against my chest. And damn, did she put up a fight. You wouldn't think such a small girl would have so much fight.

She suddenly leaned her head down and bit my arm, sinking her pointy little teeth past the cotton of my hoodie and actually breaking skin. I felt the sharp sting of it and hissed at her, but refused to let go. So did she. Lauren was sitting on her knees, sobbing into her hands as a girl rushed forward and patted her back, encouraging her to get up. When Lauren stood and saw Bella, still with her teeth sunk into my arm, she glared and pointed a shaking finger at her. "I'm going to kill you, you freak! You better watch it! You're so fucking dead!" The girl supporting her blanched and seemed to regret her decision to come to Lauren's aid, opting to quickly lead her out of the room. As she did, Bella finally released my arm, and I groaned in relief.

"If I were you, Lauren, I'd move."

Lauren turned to look at Bella over her shoulder, and there was none of the former rage or the indignation I'd seen in her face before. Her eyes were naked fear.

"All right, that's enough of that! Everybody get back to your seats!" Apparently, the teacher had found his voice. He looked at me and his eyes seemed to slide right over Bella, who had gone very still in my grasp. "That'll do, Mr. Cullen."

I quickly released Bella and mumbled an insincere apology as I went back to the doorway to retrieve my bag from where I'd dropped it. Why I got myself into these situations I couldn't tell.

Sitting beside Bella, I concentrated on not checking the extent of the damage caused to my arm. It was quite painful, and I was furious. Like this was the perfect conclusion to the day in Hell spent in the company of Bella fucking Swan. What suicidal insanity could possibly possess me to spend time with her outside of school? The teacher was going over his lecture with a high-pitched uncomfortable tenor in his voice, and I frowned in disbelief. It absolutely floored me that she had gotten away with it without so much as a warning. I watched in sick fascination as she thumbed the scratches on her face. Most of them were faded, but a few angry red lines remained on her left cheek, and she smiled to herself as she ran her fingers over them. I tore my eyes away to stare at the teacher, reading quickly through his lecture notes as though hoping to get the class over and done with as soon as possible. He didn't even look at her. Didn't even give her a stern warning. Didn't even acknowledge that she had been in a fight.

Halfway through the class the girl that had led Lauren away was back, excusing herself to pick up Lauren's bag and take it to her in the office. I saw a boy near the front, Mike something, catch her eye and mouth something to her, a question, and she shook her head slightly in response. He pursed his lips and clenched his fists, shooting a glance towards Bella. She had been watching the exchange, and she grinned at him in a way I hated even more than the bored smile. She showed him her teeth, and he quickly looked away. With the smile fixed in place, she raised her hand and interrupted the teacher without waiting for him to pause and call on her. "Mr. Banner, may I please be excused to clean myself up in the lady's room?"

The teacher nodded quickly, motioning towards the door while he continued reading. Bella slid out of her seat and brushed past me, swaggering confidently to the door without a hall pass. After this display, I doubted she ever needed one.

"Cullen."

I turned in my seat in response to hearing my name, and a pimply-faced short kid with glasses sitting behind me motioned at me to lean in closer. Something Yorkie.

"Did you know Lauren?" he whispered furiously, his eyes darting to the door and back to me.

I made a face. The way he asked in the past tense made me worry the girl had been taken away never to be seen or heard from again. It would be fitting with the absurdity of this town so far. In response to the question, however, I gave a half-shrug. "She and I have a class together."

"So you're not like her friend or anything? You have a crush on her maybe? Or she's like a cousin or something?"

I frowned in confusion. Where was this line of questions coming from? And where was it leading? I shook my head no.

The guy swallowed and narrowed his eyes at me, as though to convey a very intense importance to his next words. "Next time, unless it's your soul mate she's got a fistful of, I suggest you let Bella do what Bella does." He swallowed and ran a nervous hand through his hair. "Seriously, Cullen, consider it the best advice ever. Don't give Bella Swan a reason to hate you."

My frown deepened as he quickly slid back to his seat and stared at the teacher with an intensity I knew couldn't be owed to paying attention to what he was actually saying. I turned back to the front of the class, shaking my head at the melodramatic exchange that had just taken place. What was with this town?

It was then I noticed Bella, standing in the doorway, staring at me, her fingers caressing the scars on her face. She wasn't smiling now, neither the bored smile or the threatening grin. She was staring at me with a look of such intense hatred, I honestly wondered if I had done something seriously wrong to her. I felt like a deer caught in the headlight of that glare, and frozen, I couldn't look away or even arrange my face into an expression that would be appropriate in response to such blatant loathing. As she walked past me to her seat, she snarled at me, actually snarled, turning to the front of the class, hunching her shoulders and letting a curtain of her hair hide her face from my view. Stunned, I looked away, fingering the pages of my book as an excuse to focus on something else, anything but her. What was wrong with this girl? What was her problem with me? She didn't even know me, and she was just going to be glaring at me like I'd run over her mother?

I thought of the retarding water theory but dismissed it. Whatever was wrong with the citizens of Forks, it was on a whole different level than what was wrong with Bella Swan.


	3. Chapter 3

A/N:

Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.

Chapter 3 – "They Go in Twos"

I stared out into the drizzle the next morning and hated Forks with a vengeance. I didn't want to leave my car. I was such a fucking pussy.

The knock that came on my window wasn't totally unexpected, and I managed a weak smile as Jasper slid into the passenger seat. "I heard you got caught in the crossfire of the never-ending Swan-Mallory battle," he said without preamble, and I groaned and rolled my eyes.

"What is the deal with her? Is she passive-aggressive or something?"

Jasper chuckled and shook his head. "No, Mallory just has a knack for pushing all the wrong buttons, and Bella hates that kind of shit. You gotta admit, the hatred isn't totally unjustified."

Jasper had unwittingly answered the wrong question, but I didn't dare correct him. "Yeah, I can see how Lauren would grate against someone's nerves. Still, it seemed a little excessive."

Again, Jasper chuckled, and I looked at him. "You ain't seen nothing. Just keep an eye out for any changes you might see in Lauren today – that's my suggestion."

My eyes widened. Truly, there was something so sinister and quite terrifying about the cryptic nature of Jasper's 'suggestion'. I said nothing, pulling out my cigarettes and lighting up in thoughtful silence.

Alice hopped into the backseat suddenly, and I suppressed a jump of surprise. "Did you guys see Lauren Mallory?"

No fucking way. Jasper chuckled and got out of the car, and I followed in a daze. Lauren was just getting out of her car, and I almost didn't recognize her. The long waist-length hair she had always worn so proudly down was gone. She was wearing a hat, but clearly the tresses were no longer there. "No fucking way," I murmured.

Jasper turned to me with his hazy smile and nodded. "Bella gave Lauren a visit yesterday after school. Hopefully, this time Lauren's learned her lesson."

"This time? There've been others?"

Jasper looked almost proud. "Most people get the hint real quick not to mess with Bella, but Lauren's been dumber than most people. No matter how many times Bella schools her, she always ends up asking for it again real soon right after."

Jesus. Psycho didn't even begin to cover what kind of girl Bella was. She wasn't fit to be let out into society.

As though on cue, Bella appeared on the edge of the woods, Rosalie and Emmet in tow. "Hey, Mallory!" she called from across the field, cupping her hands around her mouth. Lauren looked like she was convinced she was having a nightmare. "Nice hat!"

Emmet laughed loudly beside Bella, and Rosalie grinned viciously. Lauren scampered into the building, shooting angry looks over her shoulder at anyone she caught staring. Oh, the drama.

As I approached my Spanish class, a morbid curiosity about just how bad the damage was under Lauren's hat overtook me. I planned on taking surreptitious looks at her during class, hopefully without being noticed. If I was, I'd offer her a compliment that I was already certain would be insincere.

As soon as I slid into my seat, she stiffened. Slouching in her chair, she pulled her hat lower over her face, and I clearly saw why. The back of her head was visibly sporting a military-issue blonde buzzcut, and she looked ridiculous. While my heart went out to her, I had to control the unkind urge to laugh. Even if it was despicable, it was quite proficiently hitting Lauren where it hurt.

She remained uncharacteristically quiet throughout the class, and the girl on the other side of her desk, Janice or Jessica or something, was shooting her sympathetic looks that I doubted were making Lauren feel any better. As soon as the bell rang, she was gone before anyone had the chance to even get out of their seats.

In gym class, the guys discussed the scrabble night again, Emmet reopening negotiations for my presence. He tried everything from bullying me into going to pleading with me to come, even resorting to bribery with two six-packs of beer, but I always gave him the same response. "I'm not sure, Em. I'll have to see."

The lunch I was dreading came too soon, and I tried my best not to fidget in my seat – not Bella's seat, I knew better now and my hair was way too sexy to be subjected to Bella's wrath. When she came, she dropped silently into the seat beside me, immediately laying her head onto her elbows and shutting her eyes.

"She's totally baked," Alice filled us in, plopping into Jasper's lap and throwing her arms around his neck. "I tried to warn her against the second bowl, but you know how she never listens. It's like I'd be saying it just to screw with her or something. I mean, why not just believe me when I tell her she doesn't wanna do that? It's not like I'm her enemy or anything. But she'll be fine. Remember that time, Jasper, when I got so baked I couldn't stand up, and you had to carry me home, and then I threw up all over your lap, and when you got in the shower my dad came home?" Alice launched into a more detailed retelling of the story, only Jasper paying any attention to her. When Rosalie appeared, she leaned her head onto Emmet's shoulder and he played with her hair absently, gazing at her with the most ridiculously happy expression on his face. Bella remained silent.

I watched her out of the corner of my eye. She opened her eyes slowly, once, and met my gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot and wet. Somehow, the sight of her so subdued was disorienting. This girl beside me looked like she needed to be taken care of, not feared. This girl beside me made no sense.

When the bell rang, Bella picked up her bag and waved silently to the table before starting to head out. I caught up to her in the hall, and we walked silently to biology together. Not so much together as in the same direction at a similar pace. She was quiet, and her face looked sad. I wondered if she felt like a fifth wheel sitting at that table day in and day out with two couples. Jasper had said they were close once, and she didn't seem to pay any more attention to Alice's noise than I did. How close were they now that he had a girlfriend semi-attached to his hip? A girlfriend that she didn't even seem to like?

She must be lonely, I suddenly realized, and the thought made me sigh. She turned to look at me then. "What?"

I shrugged as we entered the classroom, and she watched me with her watery eyes. "I was just thinking; it's not easy being around couples all the time."

Banner was trying to get everyone's attention. Bella was looking at me, though, her expression strange, her eyes slightly more lucid. She didn't speak. "We're doing our lab on the phases of mitosis today. I need one person from each table to come up and get a microscope and a box of slides." He explained how we needed to label each slide with the phase of mitosis it represented. It was an easy enough lab, I'd done it before.

"I'll get the stuff," I offered. She stared at me with that strange look and said nothing. When I came back to the table with the microscope and slides, she was rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms. "Do you mind if I go first?" I asked as I slid back into my seat, and she gave half a shrug, looking out the window. I sighed in resignation and snapped a slide into place, adjusting the lens and looking through. It wasn't like I needed her help on this lab. Still, it continued to torment me why she hated me. I had been nothing but nice to her. It made no sense at all. "Prophase," I murmured, feeling dejected about the inevitable failure of my attempts to… to what? To get her to stop hating me? To get her to like me? To get to be friends with her?

I was just about to write it down when she cleared her throat, and I looked up at her, stunned. I had prepared myself to do this in silence. "May I?" she gestured to the microscope and I nodded, mutely pushing it over to her. She looked into the eyepiece and sighed regretfully. "Prophase." I wrote it down as she reached for the next slide, hiding my amused smirk. She was disappointed I had been right. It pleased me somewhat.

We were done within the first ten minutes of class, though we'd both insisted on double-checking after one another, neither of us accepting an answer without a personal examination. By the time we were done, she seemed less sick. This left me feeling strangely relieved. I was prepared to put up with the silent treatment for the rest of the class, playing with my pen and amusing myself by staring at the back of Lauren's head, when Mr. Banner suddenly appeared at the table and picked up our worksheet. "I take it you both worked on this together?" he asked, raising his eyebrow skeptically.

I shrugged, but it was Bella that spoke. "Yeah. I think Edgar might've done this lab before, Mr. Banner." She was smiling again, that bored half-smile that made my ears ring.

"Have you, Edward?" I tried to look sheepish and smiled at him, a winning charming smile that my teachers in Chicago had loved. Banner just nodded at me. "Advanced placement?" I shrugged and continued to smile, and he shook his head and walked away mumbling.

"Whod've thunk? Pretty boy has a brain, too."

I turned to look at her, and the smile remained in place though her bloodshot eyes were burning with fury again. "Wouldn't want to hold you back, Bella," I responded. And let her make of that what she would.

Her smile twisted for a moment and she pouted again. Fucking adorable. "Listen, Edgar-"

"Edward."

"Huh?"

"My name is Edward. Not Edgar." I smiled at her, and she gaped before she could get her expression back under control.

She shook her head to clear it and growled at me. "Whatever." As she turned back to the window, I worried I really would have to spend the rest of the class being ignored by her, but she spoke without turning to face me. "What did you mean by what you said earlier? About how it's hard being around couples all the time?"

I looked at the back of her head, willing her to turn to face me, but she didn't seem about to. I tapped my pen against the table top and wondered how to say it. "I'm not used to being around people that go in twos. I guess it's just new to me. I was sort of raised by a single dad, so couples weren't a staple in my house."

Her shoulders stiffened minutely. "I guess I know what you mean. I was sort of raised by a single dad, too. My mom walked out on us when I was a kid, so Charlie was kinda stuck with me. I didn't have a life full of people in twos either. Well, until my friends."

I was shocked that she was sharing, freely offering personal information about her life to me. I wanted to push my luck, to see if I could find out more about her, to see how much she'd tell me. "How long have all your friends been all coupled up like that?"

She turned her head so I could see her profile and frowned in thought, her face cupped in her hands as she seemed to formulate a response. "Rose and Emmet have been together since eighth grade. Then Jasper and Alice since…" she sighed then, and I frantically searched for a way to keep her talking. I didn't have to, though, because she went on after a minute. "Rose and I have been best friends since kindergarten. I mean, we've pretty much been inseparable our whole lives. Then she and Emmet got together, and it was like the three of us were some kind of special club. When Jasper moved here, he fell in with us, and I guess it was about three years later that Alice found him. When they first got together, it bothered me a lot. The two and two, and just me on the outside. But they're my friends. Rose is awesome, and Emmet's like the big brother I always wanted, and Jasper and I have so much fun together." She sighed again, shaking her head as though at a memory. "Even Alice isn't so bad once you get past the ADHD thing. They're good people. They just happen to come in twos."

I suddenly realized that in the tiny bar of sunlight that had fought its way through the clouds and across the window of the class, Bella's brown hair was tinted red. It glowed, and I wanted to touch it in the worst way.

"Where's your mom?"

I blinked myself out of my reverie and made the appropriate face. "She died when I was a kid."

"Oh." She turned to look at me then, and without the hatred or the anger in her eyes, without the tough-girl act and the cursing and the despicable smile, she was gorgeous. I worked to get some moisture back in my mouth. "I'm sorry."

I shook my head and tried to smile, to show I was okay. This was how the routine always went. "It's okay. It was a long time ago. She was always sick, and Carlisle, my dad, he blames himself. He's a doctor so I guess he thought that meant he should have been able to heal her."

She nodded, then turned her attention back to the window, presenting me once again with the back of her head. I looked at the hand that wasn't cupping her face, and it was a fist in her lap. I turned back to the front and tapped my pen against the table until the end of class. She didn't speak to me again.

***

The next day, Bella didn't come to school. It was strange, how I immediately noticed the absence of the big red truck, and then how in the cafeteria, there were just five of us instead of six. I wondered if she was just out toking in the parking lot or something, because no one else at the table seemed to notice she was gone. Alice and Rosalie got into an animated discussion about Tori Amos – I blocked that shit _out_ – and Jasper and Emmet and I turned our discussions back to scrabble night.

In biology, she never showed. In between Banner's lectures, Lauren turned in her seat and continued her increasingly annoying flirtation. She'd foregone the hat, and I guessed she'd been to a hairstylist somewhere to try and salvage what was left of her hair, but there was just so little of it. I gave her my charming smile and she blushed, and I again pressed this to my advantage. "Does Bella often ditch classes as part of her routine?"

She rolled her eyes immediately at the mention of Bella and leaned conspiratorially closer. "She just drops off of the face of the earth for days at a time like this. The teachers never say anything about it, they let her get away with_murder_." Her jealousy and resentment were blaringly obvious. I mentally rolled my eyes at her. "You know her mom was kinda like the town tramp when she was living here? Well apparently she got married to a ballplayer that was_younger than her._" She watched me for a reaction to this obviously scandalous revelation, and when I did nothing but blink at her she went on. "Anyway, her mom apparently refuses to set foot in Forks, so some people think Bella's constantly taking trips down to Phoenix to see her. Most people think that when she disappears like this, it's because she got busted for something and is being held, or performing community service or something, and Chief Swan keeps it all hushed up. Her dad's the chief of police, you know that?"

"Miss Mallory, while I'm sure your chosen topic of discussion is far more interesting than cell multiplication, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave Mr. Cullen alone and focus on me, yes?" Lauren blushed and stammered an apology, but shot me a confident smile over her shoulder when he turned the other way. Jasper was right. She really never learned. If I were in Lauren's place, I'd be singing Bella's praises for the rest of my life.

Still, Lauren's stubborn stupidity was helpful to me. I sat and pondered the information she gave me. Rumors. Hearsay. There was so much about Bella I didn't know, and so much I didn't understand. She was unkind, rude and spiteful. But she was sad, too, and lonely. She was beautiful. That kind of beauty didn't belong on a bitch.

It belonged on an ingénue.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N:

Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.

Chapter 4 – Open Book aka "You Make No Sense"

Scrabble night with Jasper and Emmet was fucking hilarious. We watched Beerfest and drank beer every time someone said 'beer'. We were very, very wasted by the end of the movie. Afterwards, Rosalie and Alice came over, and all of us got sufficiently stoned before starting an epic game of scrabble. We passed out at dawn and woke up the next day when the sun had gone down. I drove home that night feeling comfortable, buzzed and hung over all at the same time. Carlisle seemed pleased that I'd made friends, but I knew it was just about easing his guilty conscience for the move.

All week I didn't see her. I was starting to settle into the routine, getting comfortable with where I was. I appreciated on a better level the kind of fun guys like Jasper and Emmet had, and even Rosalie was warming up to me enough to not snap at me every time I opened my mouth. I'd gotten really good at tuning Alice out, though when I was drunk her conversations were infinitely more interesting.

In the complacency of it all, I almost forgot Bella Swan. I almost convinced myself she wasn't real, or that her unwarranted hatred towards me wasn't real. And it was easy to, until that Wednesday morning when, smoking with Jasper beside my car, waiting for the morning bell to ring us into school, a motorcycle came roaring into the parking lot.

And Bella Swan got off of it.

She was in her jeans again, a plain white tee, and an oversized brown leather jacket that clearly didn't belong to her. Her hair, which I'd only ever seen down before, was tied up into a messy knot, and she was breathtaking.

_Fucking breathe, Cullen. Just remember to fucking breathe. _

And I needed the reminder, because I couldn't look away. Which is probably why it took me so long to realize she wasn't alone. She had been sitting behind a copper-skinned guy with a ponytail. He was so tall that even sitting on his bike while she stood next to him he was nearly at eye-level with her. She was playing with the zipper of the jacket – probably his jacket – and talking to him, but I couldn't hear a thing over the idle roar of the bike. Beside me, Jasper stiffened.

The guy on the bike said something to her that made her frown, and she stuffed her hands into the pockets of the jacket and shrugged. He looked over her shoulder – directly at me. I hated him immediately. He was looking at me with a smug face, amusement playing the corners of his lips. Shaking his head, he turned back to Bella and said something that made her laugh. Then he went and did it.

Wrapping his long arm around her waist, he pulled her to him and reached up to capture her lips with his. She kissed him back, and I growled. Jasper hissed.

I watched, furious, as she wound her hands around the back of his neck, twisting her fingers in his ponytail to pull him closer, and he reached up to cup her chin and did the same. He moved her face aside and started kissing down her jaw, leaving open-mouthed kisses along her neck that made her tilt her head back and close her eyes. My palms were sweating buckets, and the ringing in my ears drowned out even the sound of the motorcycle.

His mouth curving against her throat in a smile, he finally pulled back, leaving one more soft kiss on a red spot - a fucking hickey of all things - under her right ear, and, with a last look at me, rode away.

"I didn't know Bella had a boyfriend," I choked, knowing I was failing miserably at keeping my voice neutral or calm.

She was staring after him, her hands back in the pockets of the jacket.

"That's not her boyfriend," Jasper replied in a steady even tone that was so serious and unfamiliar coming from him, I actually turned around and looked at him. His face, flat as his voice, was also unfamiliar. "That's Jacob Black."

Bella turned around and looked at me for a moment before she walked towards the buildings, leaving me behind.

***

I didn't go to the cafeteria that day for lunch. I stood outside my car and smoked. Facing Bella after finding my niche in this place without her was too disorienting. It was like jet-lag, only a hundred times worse. I'd never really been hated by anyone - even those who might have had a good reason to hate me. The thought of not only being hated for no reason, but of being hated that way by _Bella,_ was too much.

That morning, Jasper had refused to speak a word about Jacob Black. Whoever he was, clearly none of Bella's friends liked him. When they had joined us earlier that morning, Jasper had simply told them that "Jacob dropped Bella off" and they had all found various poses of discomfort and quiet anger. Alice had been frighteningly silent.

Gym class was more of the same. Jasper and Emmet exchanged glances, sometimes whispering to one another with frowns on their faces while Jasper ran his fingers nervously through his hair, and it reminded me of the way Bella did it. How the hell did I know that? I'd seen her do it once. What was my deal? I was clearly obsessed.

The cafeteria, with all of them there, and Bella in that boy's jacket, it was too much. I preferred to be alone with my ugly thoughts.

Then the bell rang, and I didn't want to go to biology either. So what if I didn't go? A little ditching was healthy now and again.

I waited until the bell rang again before trudging to my calculus class. Just this one more class, then I could go home. Go home and not worry about facing Bella again until the next day. Or maybe she'd just disappear again.

Neither thought made me happy.

I sat through calculus in a daze, and knew I'd never be able to remember what was said in that class. When at last it was over, I had to keep myself from running to the parking lot. Of course, it was then that I realized I'd lost my keys.

I searched my pockets again and again, knowing it was unlikely I'd kept them there. I usually did, when I was out. But when I went to school, I left them in my bag, in the pouch with the side zipper. Where they currently were not.

"You all right, Edward?" I looked up to see Alice smiling weakly at me, her face more serious than usual. Bella had fucked everyone up.

"Yeah, I think I left my keys back in the class, though." She nodded, looking over to where Bella was having a furious discussion with Jasper.

Rather, Jasper was gesturing furiously while Bella stood, hands in pockets, and shrugged. She was staring at me again, and the hair on my arms stood. I rubbed my arms unconsciously, jogging back to the building to retrace my steps.

But even after the building had emptied out, and everyone had gone home, I found nothing. I was fuming, but I was tired. It had been a long day. It would just be fucking perfect if it ended with my keys gone, my cell phone in the car. I had no choice but to walk to the hospital and get Carlisle's key it seemed like, since my house key was on the same ring as the car keys. Fucking joy.

Dragging my feet back to the parking lot, I stared at the muddy grass and cursed my life. I cursed Bella Swan for confusing the living shit out of me and making me more uncomfortable than I ever remembered being in my life. I cursed Forks and everyone in it, the psychotic townsfolk that were like a spoof or something. I cursed Carlisle for being so wrapped up in his own little world that he thought moving here was a good idea. I cursed myself for letting Bella affect me. I cursed Jacob Black, too, though I wasn't sure what for. I just cursed him.

The sound of her clearing her throat was so sudden, so intrusive on this reverie, that I actually jumped.

"Jesus fucking hell!"

She giggled and shook her head. "Scary, am I?"

I eyed her in disbelief, leaning against the passenger door of my car, twirling my keys around her fingers. "Are those-?"

"Your keys? Yeah. Hey, I need a ride home."

I sputtered. Edward fucking Cullen, I actually fucking sputtered. "How did you-? When did you-? Why would you-?" Growling wordlessly, I snatched my keys out of her hand, and she gave me a mock-wounded look.

"Temper, much?"

I was grinding my teeth so hard I was in danger of cracking something in there. "Just get in the fucking car."

She slid into the passenger seat and cooed – actually fucking cooed – running her fingers over the leather. "Fancy."

I resisted another growl as I started the engine, fumbling with the music player so I could turn it down. I'd been listening to Godsmack, really fucking loud. She gave me a funny look but said nothing. "Where do you live?"

She told me, and I pulled out of the parking lot. What. The. Fuck. I was furious. I was nervous as hell. I was a fucking mess, and it was all because of this tiny little irresistibly sexy yet unbearably infuriating girl sitting beside me. What the fuck!

"So you wanna tell me why you stole my fucking keys?" I asked in my most civil tone after a minute in silence. Never mind _how_ she stole them.

She shrugged. "I needed a ride home."

I snorted. "And it didn't occur to you to just ask?"

She looked at me in that funny way again. "I could have just asked," she said slowly. "But then you could have said no." I could have said no. But I didn't. I must be some sort of masochist. "You don't like me."

She said it so calmly, so matter-of-factly, I turned to stare at her in disbelief. She rolled her eyes and held the steering wheel when I stared at her instead of the road too long, and I impatiently slapped her hand away, turning my eyes back to where I was going.

When I touched her skin, electricity shot up my arm, and I ground my teeth. What the fuck was going on here? Was this some strange yet vivid dream? Nothing made sense.

"You hate me!" I accused loudly, stupidly. What can you say to someone like Bella Swan that doesn't make you look like an idiot?

She was looking at me again. "You think I hate you?"

Was she serious? "Are you serious?"

She just looked.

"You've been nothing but rude to me – _at best_. You glare at me so much, it's a wonder your face doesn't stick that way. You went out of your way to get rid of me when we were assigned lab partners. You've never once gotten my name right." As I spoke, it sounded weak. Pathetic. I sounded like an idiot. It just made me angrier. "You just- you're not even…" What could I say?

She smiled to herself, like she was smiling at a personal joke I wasn't in on. "I can see why you'd believe that." Was she being sarcastic? Was she making fun of me? I didn't know with her. I never knew with her.

I clenched the steering wheel in my sweaty palms, and she only spoke to give me directions. When we pulled up outside her house, there were no cars in the driveway. I waited for her to get out of the car, but she sat beside me in silence, her hands in the pockets of the jacket again.

"I don't get you, Bella." Word vomit. Shut up. Shut up! "You're really doing a number on my mental health here. I can't read you at all." And I was usually so good at reading people.

She raised her eyebrows at this, and the smile grew a little wider. "Weird. My mom used to tell me I was like an open book. She said whatever I was feeling was so obvious in my face, you wouldn't ever need to try to figure me out."

Like that was supposed to help? I shook my head and sighed in frustration. "If you hate me, why did you get a ride with me? Why didn't you get a ride with Emmet or Rosalie or Jasper?"

She winced, then sighed and looked at me again. Her eyes were so brown, so deep. I wanted to get lost in them. Get lost in them? Jesus. I was a fucking pussy.

"You wanna drive me to school tomorrow?"

I blinked. "Huh?" Brilliant diction, Cullen. Truly.

"I said, do you wanna drive me to school tomorrow? I'm asking." She smiled a little, but didn't look away. "You can say no."

I stared at her, and for a moment, just a tiny little moment, I let my inner pussy go free. Her messy hair, damp from the rain and stringy in some places, was the perfect foil to her pale translucent skin. She had a small scar across one eyebrow and a small cluster of scars under her left ear that most people probably didn't see. Her lips were this perfect symmetrical shape, full and pink and so inviting. She had these long lashes that brushed the apples of her cheeks when she closed her eyes. I let myself get lost in her eyes. I reigned the inner pussy back in. "Sure."

She smiled then, and maybe it was the first time I saw her smile like that. Smile and mean it. "Thanks for the ride."

I sat in my car as she jogged through the rain to her house, and I was dazed and beyond reigning the inner pussy in. She had just dazzled me. I had been dazzled. Totally and hopelessly dazzled. Fuck.

Fucking fuck.

**AN/**

**Random thought:**

**My spouse and I were talking a few days ago about 'mainstream music' and how regional it is. It hit me suddenly that my 'cool obscure' music tastes were only obscure HERE. and maybe in the US or Canada or Europe or wherever they weren't so obscure. It was kinda humbilng for me, because as much as I love music (we're a very musical family) I probably don't know a fraction as much as I want to. So if any of you feel like name-dropping a cool band or artist, please do.**

**/End 'Random thought.'**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money ****it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

**This next chapter has been my favourite to write so far. I'm not sure why, it's a little awkward and it leaves you feeling slightly disoriented (it left me feeling silghtly disoriented anyway) but I love it all the same. It's my baby. So I couldn't cut it up and it's longer than the other chapters.**

Chapter 5 – Phenomenon aka "Ride"

"Son? Is that you?"

Who else? But I stopped at Carlisle's study anyway, letting him see that yes, father dearest, it was I, your son.

"How was school?"

I shrugged. "Not bad. I ditched biology class."

"Oh." He frowned, unsure what to do with this information apparently. "Well… don't do that again."

I nodded absently. "Is that all?"

"Of course." He cleared his throat and replaced his reading glasses back on his face, leaning over his book. I walked away. It was so easy.

In my room, I put on a Deftones CD. I hadn't really listened to any Deftones in years, but I wanted something loud to drown out my thoughts. It was all getting to be so strange. I couldn't make any sense of the day, and I sure as hell couldn't make any sense of Bella.

That night, I had my first dream about her.

***

"Do you love me?" I looked at her, and I was stunned, by her question and by her appearance. She looked like she was glowing in a lacy white dress, all wrong for her - too soft, too feminine. Her voice was musical, her eyes warmer, and she tilted her head as she asked me again, "Do you love me?"

I was unable to answer, and finally she sighed and turned away. She walked down a long hallway, her hand sliding along the wall to her left as she hummed a strangely familiar melody, and I watched her leave me behind. At the end of the tunnel, you could hear a motorcycle engine being revved.

***

The sound of my alarm was welcome; it drowned out the bike. I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom, remembering bits and pieces of the dream, trying to put together a coherent thought. Today, I'd pick Bella up for school.

Away from her, from the intoxicating quality of her voice, from the pheromones stinking up the place – she smelled like flowers and oranges – it was easy to imagine that the encounter had been a dream. That all of yesterday had been a dream, and that my week of life in Forks without her was still going on, uninterrupted.

I would find out for sure whether it really was a dream when I showed up at her house in a few minutes to take her to school.

Fucking fabulous.

Sternly commanding myself to be casual, I threw on my jeans – standard issue manly casualness – and a faded Star Wars t-shirt. My jacket won out over my hoodie, not wanting to overdo the casualness, and sneakers. Ok. Time to go. Ten minutes to get ready, not bad at all.

Not at all gay.

In the car I fumbled through my CDs. What the hell did I feel like listening to? I always had music on, because I was always in the mindset for something specific to listen to. What the hell did I want to listen to now? AFI? Thrice? What artist or album would match perfectly the tension and strange buzz of expectation that accompanied me on my way to pick up Bella Swan? To drive her to school. It wasn't like this was a date.

The thought of dating her terrified me on so many levels I couldn't even begin to make sense of it at all.

And Forks being the shitass small town it was, I was there too soon, and I still had no idea what I wanted to listen to. When I pulled up to her house, I was immediately aware of two things. One: Bella Swan was standing at the window, peeking out between the curtains, a strange smile on her face. Two: there was a police cruiser outside her house, and leaning against it was a man with tight brown curls and large brown eyes. Her dad. A cop. Fuck me.

My memory presented me with Lauren giving me this information some time ago. Bella's father was the Chief of Police. Well, what a wonderful way to be reminded. An interview. Clearly, he was waiting for me. Clearly, Bella was amused.

As soon as I got out of the car, he stepped away from the cruiser and smiled, a polite I-hate-you smile. "Edward Cullen," he said as he shook my hand, and I nodded and tried a smile of my own, even though it wasn't a question.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Sir."

He raised his eyebrow as though he saw right through my loved-by-all-adults façade. He probably did. He was a fucking cop. "I heard you're taking my daughter to school today."

"Yes, Sir, I am. If it's all right with you, of course," I hastily added as he looked around me at my car.

He eyed it with some satisfaction, then turned to me again. "Edward, do you happen to own a motorcycle?"

A motorcycle? "No, Sir. I'm not really sure I know how to drive one."

He smiled. Obviously, that had been the right answer. "Good. Drive safely. Don't be late."

And with that, he turned and got into the driver's seat of his cruiser, pulling out of the driveway and driving off without a backwards glance. The door opened then, and I turned to glare at Bella. She had orchestrated this. She could've come out while he was still there and acted as a buffer, but nooooo. Why ruin a perfectly awkward moment?

"Let's go," she beckoned to me from the passenger side of my Volvo, and I dragged my feet back to the car, mumbling loud enough for her to know I was complaining about her. Like the name thing, like the glaring, like trying to get out of being my lab partner, this was another one of those things you did to someone you hated that wouldn't hold up in a court of law as truly malicious. I was quickly discovering that Bella Swan was the queen of non-malicious hatred. She was wearing her jeans again, and a pale yellow cotton blouse under that damned leather jacket. The scent of flowers and oranges was strong when I got in the car.

I started the engine and cleared my throat. "So, that's your dad," I offered in the silence presented by my inability to find the right soundtrack to this tension-party.

She shrugged as though it didn't matter. "He likes you all right, if it makes any difference."

I raised skeptical eyebrows. "Oh does he?"

She nodded. "You're sort of awesome by association. Your dad."

I groaned. She didn't need to say more. Awesome Carlisle Cullen, medical genius, doctor extraordinaire, what more could possibly be said about him? Palming my eyes against the oncoming headache – an inevitability in the face of thinking about Carlisle – I shook my head to clear it. When I looked at her again she was looking at me, her eyes wide and strange and so deep brown and _fuck_… Those eyes were going to do something funny to me one day. "What?" I had to get her to stop looking at me like that!

"Nothing. Do you smoke?" she asked in a sudden subject-change, pulling a little tin case out of a zipper in her bag and rattling it.

I shrugged. "Not too often."

"Mind if I do?"

Again, I shrugged. She took out a little pipe the length of her finger and unrolled a baggie, and I fumbled again with the CDs. Really, had the world not written a soundtrack for this? Suddenly, her hand was on mine, pushing it gently away, and she was rifling through my CDs, clucking and chuckling randomly. I knew it was random because she wasn't making sense. No way was she chuckling at my Linkin Park CD. That shit was just fucking wrong. It _must_ be random.

Finally, she grunted, taking a CD case out of her bag and picking one up from near the front. She slid it into the slot and turned it up before I had a chance to protest or ask what the shit music she was playing in my car.

"The rain falls hard on a humdrum town…"

Morrissey? "Morrissey?"

She glared at me over her pipe. "The Smiths."

Ah. A purist. Well. How about that. She hummed as she held her breath, and I shook my head in wonder. Her eyes were closed, her head rolling from side to side slowly on the headrest as though she heard something strange, something special in the beat. When she released the breath she'd been holding right at the chorus, she bit her lip and opened her eyes lazily. "Fuck…"

And I kid you not, I popped a fucking boner right then and there. Fucking. Hell.

She moaned at the parts of the song that I assumed she liked best, her eyes squeezing tightly shut in pleasure. Unbelievable. This girl was getting hot and bothered over this song, I could see it in the way her skin started turning that delicious shade of pink. Her eyes, watery and bloodshot, were darkened with passion. Her breathing became shallow. It was getting harder to keep my eyes on the road, and I wanted to clear my throat and shift my erection in my pants, but I was afraid any sound I made, any sudden movement, would break the spell and she'd go back to being Bella Swan, non-malicious hater extraordinaire.

The track ended. She kept her eyes closed until the next one started. "All men have secrets and here is mine…"

And she gasped and shuddered and turned to look at me then, unleashing the full force of her gorgeous brown eyes on me, and I was lost. I was so fucking lost, there was no way I was going to escape this. No way I was going to escape her. Escape the fact that Bella Swan was real. Even if she disappeared again, to visit her mother or perform community service or serve hard time, I would never be able to escape the fact that she was out there somewhere, and I would think of her. One track moved on to the next, and my heart raced. And we were at school, and all I wanted to do was drive right past the thing and take her somewhere beautiful and tell her amazing things. I pulled into a space and turned to stare at her. Her eyes were surreal. They made my entire body tingle. How could a girl's eyes be so powerful? She could have been naked and I wouldn't have been able to look away from her eyes. Mmm, naked Bella… I wanted to touch her. I wanted to kiss her. When the fuck did that happen?

"Bella…"

And without warning, she reached out and placed her fingers on my lips, and I struggled to swallow. I struggled to breathe. I couldn't look away. "Don't spoil it, Edward." She smiled, sighing, before she shook her head and got out of my car, and a wave of cold air came in to chase away the warmth from her proximity. It was the first time she'd ever said my name. It sounded like a prelude to something wonderful when she said it, the way her lips shaped themselves around it, the way her breath caressed it. My internal organs were doing some kind of rain dance, and I couldn't focus my eyes on any one thing. I touched my lips carefully where she had, swallowing again. She was stoned. She was just being an idiot. I was being an idiot. Was I ever going to stop being an idiot around her?

Clearly, not anytime soon.

***

Alice was less talkative than usual at lunch, leaning her head on Jasper's shoulder while he stroked her hair absently. He'd been giving me strange looks all through gym, but I'd chosen to let him decide when he would bring up whatever he wanted to say.

Bella and Rosalie were discussing something with their heads put together, giggling behind their hands while Emmet smiled proudly at them. "Bella, what's the deal with the truck? Is it dead?"

She looked up at him and gave him a strange look. "Again, with this?"

Emmet's grin got wider, and he shrugged in faux innocence. "I'm just asking because you haven't driven it to school lately. You know, getting a ride with Cullen, or that kid, Black."

Jasper turned a warning glare on Emmet, but Emmet just rolled his eyes in response. Rosalie's brow furrowed, and Alice lifted her head to look at Bella. Bella pouted. It was so fucking adorable. "It just needs a little work. I left it in La Push."

Emmet nodded again, his smile still in place. "I see. It must need a lot of work seeing as how it's been there all week."

Jasper interrupted before Bella could react. "Let it go, Emmet."

Rosalie fidgeted and shot me a glance, as though wishing to say something she didn't want me to hear. I blinked innocently at her, and she scowled at me. "You know, Bella, if you needed work done on your truck, you could've called me."

Bella pursed her lips. "I know you know what you're doing, Rose, but that truck was Jacob's pretty much his whole life. He's just more familiar with it. It's nothing personal."

I frowned before I could help myself and twirled my bottle cap on the table in agitation. Nothing personal? That guy sticking his tongue down her throat was nothing personal? What the fuck?

Jasper snorted then, and I looked to him for support. I desperately wanted him to say out loud something that would reflect my thoughts. "Bella, you of all people know that everything is personal to Jacob Black."

Okay, not really what I was hoping for. But at least he didn't seem to like it either.

"Thanks, _Mommy_, but I'm sure I'll manage not to fall over and _die_ without your vigilant supervision," Bella growled, and a part of me growled back at her. I wanted to argue with her desperately, but I had nothing to say. I had no ammunition. I didn't even know what was going on. Wordlessly, I picked up my tray, dropped it off, and left the cafeteria.

Fuck it. I was being needlessly agitated, and I wasn't even sure why. It was obvious this was some old argument among the five of them. I couldn't contribute either way to it. Besides, Rosalie's look at least told me there were things they would have an easier time discussing without my presence. Let them discuss what they wanted to. What did I care about Bella Swan or her personal relations with Jacob Black who apparently was fixing her car? For a week. And then dropping her off at school and licking her in front of everybody. _Christ_.

I sat in my Volvo and turned up my music. I chain-smoked and refused to allow myself to wonder what else Bella and Jacob fucking Black did that week. Of course, my mind went and thought about it anyway. I mean, if he was doing _that_to her in public, what would he do to her in private? Rhetorical question. So why did I care?

Because she looked so delicious when she walked into a room and looked at everyone like they were her property? Because she acted like her company was a precious gift to those around her? Because she got off to Morrissey in my car this morning? I thought of the way she had looked again and groaned to myself. It was sexy as hell that she didn't even look like she was trying to be sexy as hell. Rosalie was sexy, but Rosalie must wake up at the asscrack of dawn to look like _that _by the time she got to school. Bella looked like she rolled out of bed and did it. She probably did.

When the bell signaling the end of lunch rang, I turned up the volume on my stereo. I was so not going back in there. So what if this was the second biology class in a row I was missing? I knew that shit. I was getting a little nauseous and dizzy from all that nicotine in my system, coupled with not having eaten anything all day. My head felt like it was floating a little, which wasn't so bad except that the rest of my body seemed to be in some sort of panic about getting it to come back down.

But of course, I should have known Bella wouldn't let me get away so easily. She was walking over to my car, her hands in the pockets of that jacket I fucking loathed. She looked pretty hot in it, but still. Didn't she have any jackets of her own? I mean, didn't this Jacob Black get cold without his jacket? Shouldn't she give it back already?

She slid into the passenger seat without asking permission, then turned down the volume on Claudio Sanchez without permission. I stared straight ahead and pretended she wasn't there. Yeah right. Like I could ever pretend I couldn't feel the warmth of her against my side. Like I could pretend I couldn't smell her – flowery and citrusy – cutting through the cigarette smoke cloud around my head.

"You're upset," she murmured, like she was talking to herself. "I wonder why."

I locked my jaw. I wondered why, too.

"You don't want to be around me?"

I looked at her, shocked. "Didn't we have this conversation already? You're the one that hates _me_, remember?"

She smiled at me, a small smile that made her look so devastatingly beautiful I had to look away. "The way I've acted towards you. It couldn't have made you like me."

Wasn't I just thinking I wanted to escape her?

"Who's going to drive you home?" I asked instead.

She bit her lip, and I was reminded of my earlier urges to fuck her. "Why?"

"I think I'm ready to go now," I invented, but realized it was a brilliant idea as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I wanted to get out of this place. "I want to make sure you get home okay."

She smiled again. "Let's blow this popsicle stand." And she buckled her seatbelt.

I stared at her in disbelief. Did she actually just say that? I hadn't heard anyone say that since I was a kid. I swallowed. "You want me to take you home? Now? What about class?"

She shrugged, still smiling. "Let's go someplace else. I'm kinda hungry actually. Have you eaten anything?"

I shook my head. Apparently, I looked unconvinced though because she laughed a little. "I'm a good student. I can get away with missing a few classes." Yeah, I'm sure her stellar grades were the reason she got away with so much shit at school. She laughed again as she seemed to read my mind. "Relax, okay? Let's go."

I could have said no. I should have said no. I should have taken her straight home and gone to bed where I could rest. I still felt sick from all that nicotine. She was fucking with my floating head though, and her smell was intoxicating in the enclosed space. But I was realizing that, coupled with being an idiot around her, I couldn't say no to Bella.

I backed out of the parking lot and concentrated on controlling the vehicle. The nausea was getting worse. "Hey, are you okay?"

I glanced at her and her face was such a picture of utterly sincere concern, I let myself believe she cared. I nodded slightly, looking back at the road, but she leaned over and reached out her tiny little hand to place it on my forehead. Her closeness was doing strange things to my already floating head, so I gently brushed her hand aside. "I'm fine," I lied quickly.

She sat back down and pouted again, and I cleared my throat uncomfortably. "Take the next left," she gestured to the left, and as her arm came up I was hit with another wave of her scent. Was she trying to kill us both by distracting me into wrapping my car around a tree? Biting back a groan, I took the turn she indicated, then pulled over in the parking lot outside the little diner she pointed to. When I was parked, I sat back and breathed a sigh of relief. No major accidents. I hadn't lost control of the car. I'd never considered either of those things a major victory before, but I was willing to overlook how short my change was in this scenario.

Bella jumped out of her seat and came around to my side. I watched her open my door and squat on the ground so she was next to me.

"You sure you're okay?"

I nodded. She really did look like she cared. It was hard to come to terms with that, hard to imagine it. Her sudden politeness, kindness even, was disarming. It came on suddenly, like a strange phenomenon, like a miracle or a meteor or something. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't figure it out. I didn't know what to do around her all of a sudden. I forced a small smile, and it seemed to please her. She stood back up and held out her hand, and I hesitantly took it. Standing up, she was so much smaller than I was. It made her seem fragile, somehow, and I realized why her friends seemed to worry about her so much. Her features were so soft, and her skin was so pale, and I wanted to protect her, too. Unthinkingly, I reached out and brushed a strand of her hair away from her face. Blame it on the dizziness.

She looked shocked for a moment, then there was fear in her face. She dropped her gaze to her feet, and I wondered if she'd let go of my hand, but when she looked back up at me she seemed determined. She smiled and started to lead me into the diner, and I had no choice but to follow and wonder what the hell that was all about.

Inside, it was dim and smelled like fries. The smell of the food brought on the nausea, but my traitorous stomach actually growled. Bella looked at me over her shoulder and giggled. She'd heard it. Brilliant. She slid into a booth in the back corner, and the closest patrons were three tables away. When she let go of my hand to pick up a menu I felt a pang of loss and missed the contact. She seemed not to notice, or maybe she did, because she was smirking at me. "I'll order for us."

I groaned and put my head on my folded arms, resting on the tabletop. I was in no state to deal with her. Even in perfect condition, keeping up with Bella Swan was a challenge I wasn't sure I was up to. In my current condition, I didn't have a prayer. I let her giggle at me and couldn't even muster up the energy to glare at her for it.

The waitress came soon and asked if I was all right. "He's fine," Bella reassured her, "He's just got a tummy ache." Would the mockery ever end? She ordered too much food and I wanted to stop her, but I was too out of it to even lift my head. The waitress left, but not before offering to bring some tea for my stomach, which Bella graciously accepted, adding a coffee for herself. "Hey," she spoke softly, and then I felt her fingers on my scalp. She was smoothing my hair away from my face, and I opened my eyes to see her. Damn, she was beautiful.

I lifted my head from my arms and she dropped her hand back on the table. "Thank you," I offered awkwardly. I had no idea how to talk to her. And her gentleness was disarming.

She blinked at me. "For what?"

I shrugged. "For worrying, I guess."

She rolled her eyes. "No problem." Clearly, she thought very little of it. Clearly, I was obsessed with her because I didn't. I thought her worrying about me was wonderful.

"So, why does everyone hate this Jacob Black person?" I asked hesitantly, wondering if this was okay. She was being nice to me, so maybe it was okay if I asked her a few questions.

She looked at me for so long without speaking, I thought she was going to pretend she hadn't heard me. The waitress brought my tea and Bella's coffee, and still she didn't say anything. "Drink your tea," she ordered, "and I'll tell you some of the story."

I obeyed instantly, subsequently burning my tongue on the scalding hot drink. I winced, and she smiled. It looked so unfamiliar after seeing her glare and scowl and pout at me all the time, it was almost like she was a completely different person.

"Jacob and I sort of grew up together. His dad and my dad are old friends, so I spent a lot of time around Jake and his sisters as a kid. About two years ago, though, we started dating." I pretended this revelation meant nothing to me. "But, of course, Jasper and the rest of them didn't think he was good for me. They said I got a little out of hand when we hooked up. I started acting reckless, irresponsible. And I developed some sort of anger issues, too, apparently." She smirked as though she didn't take any of their concerns seriously. "Jake and I were only together for a few months, but I guess they'll always hate him."

I eyed her suspiciously. "Are you sure that's all there is to the story?"

She looked surprised, then her pleasant smile was back. "No, there's more. But I'm not ready to tell you that part yet."

I nodded. At least she was being honest. "So last week when you disappeared…"

She shrugged. "Jake and I are still friends. Whenever I get a little restless or fed up with Forks, or I just want to get away from the world, I go down to La Push and we hang out. He's not so protective of me, so we have fun together. Sometimes, Jasper makes me feel like he's my babysitter more than my friend. He disapproves of a lot of things I enjoy - motorcycles, rock climbing, cliff-diving."

"Cliff-diving?"

She nodded, suddenly excited. "They do it all the time in La Push. You find yourself a nice high cliff, and just throw yourself off it into the ocean. It's invigorating."

Extreme sports? Bella? "It sounds kinda crazy," I confessed. What was the fun in literally throwing yourself off a cliff?

She smirked at me. "Scared?" I frowned. Edward Cullen was not fucking scared. She laughed at my expression, and the sound was throaty and sultry.

I harrumphed and drank my tea. She grinned and shook her head at me, and I smiled into my cup hoping she wouldn't notice. I liked her laugh. And I liked that she was teasing me. _Totally obsessed, Cullen. You fucking pussy._

The waitress brought the food then, and Bella inhaled two double cheeseburgers like it was her last meal. I ate my own cheeseburger in shock, wondering if she always ate like this. When she finally pushed the second empty plate away and sat back in her seat, she had a satisfied look on her face. "Feel better?" she asked, and I nodded. I actually did. The food was settling my stomach and my head seemed to have reattached itself to my body for now.

"Can I ask you another question?" I asked, and she narrowed her eyes at me.

"One."

I nodded and thought for a minute. If I only had one question, I wanted to choose it carefully. "Why are you suddenly nice to me?"

She sighed as though she expected as much, smiling softly and looking away. "Later, Edward. I'll tell you later."

I frowned. "That wasn't right. I get another question, right? You didn't really answer that one."

She laughed, amused. "All right, go ahead."

I thought again. "When Jacob Black brought you to school yesterday on his bike…" How could I word this in a gentlemanly way? "You seemed like more than friends."

She wasn't smiling anymore. "That's not a question."

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. "You said you two broke up, but then you act like that in public, and there seems to be some sort of inconsistency in your story."

"Still not a question, Cullen."

Uh-oh. I was Cullen now? "What kind of relationship do you really have with Jacob Black?" I almost snapped.

Her eyes narrowed. "We're friends."

"Friends who lick each other?"

I wanted to take the words back as soon as they were out of my mouth, but it was too late. "Friends," she repeated through gritted teeth.

And I was too far gone to let it go. I had to know, it was driving me crazy. "So naked friends. Friends with benefits. That sort of thing?"

She growled, and it was so cute. Like a kitten trying to be a lion. Not the time, Edward. Focus. "Why do you even care? What's it to you what kind of friends Jacob and I are?"

I sat back when I realized we'd been leaning in towards one another unconsciously. Her scent was distracting, and I didn't want to be distracted right now. I needed the full use of my brain. "I just want to know what kind of person you are, Bella. I mean, I've seen so many moods and heard so many conflicting stories, it's like you're eight different people. Of course, if you don't want to tell me, I can probably gather some gossip and come to my own conclusions."

She rolled her eyes. "Oh _gawd_. Please not the gossip. The shit some people say about me, you'd think I was Elizabeth Bathory."

"So, just tell me. What's the big secret?" I was growing increasingly frustrated and so was she. Groaning loudly, she threw herself back into her seat and covered her face with her hands.

"We're friends, and sometimes we fuck, okay? We have an understanding, and we're not getting back together. It's just something else we do that I enjoy and that Jasper disapproves of."

I hated that. I'd asked for it, but really really I hated it. Before it had been speculation. Now I knew for a fact that the behemoth had been with her in the most intimate of ways, and it made my skin crawl. She must have seen my disgust on my face.

"Don't you dare fucking judge me." She was glaring at me like I'd backstabbed her.

"I'm not judging you," I ground out. "I just don't like it." Stupid word vomit. Shut up!

She looked surprised at this. "Why would it bother you?"

I shook my head and refused to answer. She apparently saw this because she was angry again. "I should get you home," I said quickly before she could start in on me. The final bell would be ringing now in school.

I pulled out my wallet before she could reach for hers and motioned to her that she shouldn't bother. She accepted with poor grace, getting up from the table and waiting for me by the door. I rolled my eyes at her. She was being childish.

The ride back to her house was quiet and tense, and I wondered if I should make conversation or something. But every time I got to talking to Bella Swan, I either sounded like an idiot or made her angry. Even if I did end up befriending Jasper and Emmet, and even Alice with her mindless chatter was growing on me, I knew Bella and I wouldn't be friends. It was actually easier winning Rosalie over. Bella was just out of the question. I was fine with that. Yeah, I was. Fucking fine. I totally didn't care.

Outside her house she sighed, and again didn't get out of the car. "Can you pick me up for school again tomorrow?" I looked at her in disbelief. Had I just imagined that disastrous lunch? "Please?"

And she looked at me, and I was so fucked. No way could I say no to her. Forget it. I was so fucked. I nodded silently and she looked relieved and pained at the same time. Shaking her head, she took her bag and got out of the car, not stopping to look back as she made her way to the door and into her house.

***

"Edward?"

I frowned. Carlisle wasn't supposed to be home today. "Yeah."

"We're in the dining room." _We?_

I walked into the dining room hesitantly, my eyes peeled for any sign that I should race up the stairs or out the door. Carlisle was standing in the center of the room, which was still empty, with a picturesque woman with chestnut hair and a motherly face. She smiled when I came in. "Oh, Dr. Cullen, he looks just like you!"

Huh?

Carlisle smiled proudly at me. "Oh, I don't know. It's all his mother I think. Especially those green eyes."

The woman nodded, still smiling at me.

"Edward, this is Esme Platt. She's going to be helping us design the new place." The way his voice caressed her name made my eyebrows shoot up my forehead. Whoa. Seriously? Carlisle had a crush? That had certainly not happened since my mother.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Platt," I responded, offering her my winning smile and trying to make my eyes sparkle. She seemed to respond, smiling widely back at me.

"Miss," she corrected, and I nodded. "You're a senior, aren't you, Edward?" I nodded again, offering another smile. "Then you must know my daughter! She's in your grade. Rosalie Hale?"

Whoa. Seriously?

**AN/**

**The album Bella plays in the car is Hatful of Hollow, and it's a compilation album. It's also the first album I ever heard by the Smiths, and one of my favourites of all time. Check it out if you can.**


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money ****it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

Chapter 6 –Invitations aka "One of THOSE Days"

I had the same dream again that night, only she spoke my name. "Do you love me, Edward?" I woke up feeling anguished. Two nights in a row with dreams of Bella. Clearly, I was being voodooed or something.

At least she didn't seem to hate me anymore, so that was one step forward. A big fucking step forward, because my hair felt safe again. I spent a few extra minutes in front of the mirror admiring it, re-establishing my attachment to it. Thank you, God. It seems like I can keep it.

On my way out, I paused at a box of old clothes near the kitchen, blinking at a leather sleeve dangling down its side. Not stopping to think twice about it, I picked it up and jogged outside to the car, tossing it in the back seat as I rushed over to Bella's.

I put on her Smiths CD in the car, hoping to get her to make more of those faces and sounds. When I pulled up this time, there was no cruiser, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I honked twice, hoping she was ready. Was I early? I couldn't be if her father was already gone to work.

But apparently I wasn't, because in thirty seconds, Bella had come out the front door and turned around to lock it. She was wearing a faded grey cotton blouse and those cutoff jeans again, and I immediately decided I liked them better because her calves looked so delicate. Even if she insisted on wearing those ratty sneakers. And that jacket. Ugh.

She ran to my car, throwing herself into her seat and shivering. "It's fucking freezing out there!" she greeted me, and I shook my head at her. She really was quite cute when she swore. "What?"

Smiling, I reached into the back seat and offered her the jacket from the box. It was leather, too, of a superior quality than the one she was wearing, and a much more flattering black instead of the icky brown one. "I used to love this jacket when I was in junior high," I started, and she looked puzzled as she took it carefully and inspected it. "I outgrew it like a million years ago, but I couldn't throw it out."

"It's nice," she murmured lamely, clearly uncertain of what kind of reaction I was expecting.

"I'm glad you think so," I mused. "It's yours."

She looked at me like I had just told her I was the secret lovechild of George Michael. "I don't-"

"I'd like you to have it," I said earnestly. "Please." It was true. I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to wear it. Not just because I was really starting to detest the sight of her in Jacob Black's jacket, but because it really had made me think of her. I knew she would look perfect in it.

She looked at the jacket, her expression so sad I wondered if I'd upset her. Then she turned to me and smiled, the most beautiful smile I'd seen yet. "Thank you, Edward."

I smiled back, unable to find my voice, and pulled out of her driveway. As I did, she took off Jacob's jacket and folded it carefully over her headrest before slipping on the jacket I'd just given her. The sleeves were slightly too long, but she looked ravishing in it. Holding her wrists up to her face she inhaled the scent of it. "It smells so good," she murmured. "Like real leather and cigarette smoke."

She made happy giggling noises as she inhaled the scent, and turned her big brown eyes at me. I realized suddenly that this jacket had been a huge deal to me back when I still wore it, and that now it was hers. I realized suddenly that she would wear it. I realized suddenly that every time she did, a part of me would be with her. The jacket was as close as I was going to get to that, short of lopping off a limb or something. And giving Bella my ear seemed a little too much too fast. My heart raced. My brain turned to mush. I smiled at her. Inside, my inner pussy composed sonnets and sang ballads. Shit. Wait what? Shit! Alarmed by the sudden realization of what was happening to me, I turned back to face the road and gripped the steering wheel tight. My hands were sweaty. Shit. Shit shit shit.

As she started humming along to Morrissey, I palmed my fucking face and resisted the urge to groan, cry, or smack myself. Because right there when my inner pussy started singing Whitney Houston to this volatile, crazy, incredibly sexy and incredibly bitchy – yet incredibly sweet when she wanted to be – this incredibly confusing girl, it hit me why. It hit me why I hated Jacob Black and why I was obsessed with her. It hit me why I was an idiot and why I couldn't say no to her. It hit me and damn if it wasn't the strangest fuckery.

I liked her.

I liked Bella fucking Swan.

I must have been a fucking masochist.

***

At school, I launched myself out of my car before she did. Jasper and Alice were nowhere in sight, but Emmett and Rosalie were standing by his Jeep, passing a flask discreetly back and forth. At the sight of me, Rosalie winced, shook her head, then approached me with a determined face.

"Edward," she greeted me, holding out the flask and throwing a nervous smile at Bella when she caught up to me. I emptied it out and handed it back to her, and she frowned disapprovingly. I waited for her to let me have it, but she just clenched her teeth and took a deep breath before speaking. "My mother would like to invite you and your father to dinner tomorrow night. If you're free." She made a face. "She'd very much like you both to try her roast."

I hunched my shoulders and hid a scowl. This was embarrassing for Rosalie, that much was clear. But it was embarrassing for me, too. "I'll have to ask Carlisle," I muttered, "but I'm pretty sure he'll be there." Hell yeah, he'd be there. With fucking bells on.

"What's going on?" Bella whined, turning her bloodshot stoned eyes to me, and Rosalie and I exchanged grimaces.

"Esme's got the hots for Cullen's old man," Emmett guffawed, and Rosalie smacked his arm and hissed at him.

"Just come over at six. Esme says your dad already knows the place."

Bella made a face. "Ugh. Old people sex. Nasty."

"Esme would crucify you if she heard you call her old," Rosalie muttered, then shook her head as though to dispel an unpleasant mental image. She seemed to do a double-take at the sight of Bella and raised her eyebrows. "Hey where'd you get the jacket?"

"Edward gave it to me," Bella slurred, and I wondered how wasted she was. But she looked so damn cute when she held out her arms to showcase the jacket and smiled at me as though I were Santa. "Smell it, Rose! It smells so good."

Rosalie turned to look at me suspiciously, and I tried my best to look innocent. "I found it this morning and thought it might look good on her."

Emmett looked at me with a strange stunned expression on his face, and Rosalie chewed her lip in vexation.

"It smells so good…"

The bell rang then, and Bella started to stumble to her class. I caught her as her foot caught on… erm… nothing I could really see… Well, she tripped, and I caught her. And she felt perfect in my arms. And while I was all for copping a feel usually, the revelation earlier in the car, coupled with the ick that was Carlisle and Rosalie's mom, was throwing me for a loop. Bella murmured quick thanks and walked in an unsteady line to her first class. I watched her go with a worried frown. What if she tripped over air again?

"Cullen." I turned around to look at Rosalie, and she was glaring at me. "Watch it." I blinked and looked to Emmett for an inappropriate comment, but he was watching me too. His face looked… worried. Fuck the what?

Shaking my head, I headed to my class feeling that this was going to be one of those days. I got in my seat and pretended I didn't notice Lauren and Jessica's inept flirtation. This proved impossible when Lauren touched my shoulder again. One time she was going to do that and I would rip the damn thing right off.

"Hey Edward, got any plans for the weekend?"

Danger, Will Robinson!

"Actually, I have a prior engagement," I offered politely, suddenly grateful for the ick that was Carlisle and Rosalie's mom.

"Oh," Lauren blinked, and seemed to decide on a new course of action: obtain gossip. "With who?"

Whom. God this girl annoyed me. "Just a friend."

And here, Lauren's eyes turned to saucers and Jessica actually squeaked. "Really? I see."

I looked at her, annoyed all over again. Was she being particularly stupid today?

Lauren snapped her jaw shut and offered a weak and unconvincing smile. The teacher called the class to order and she swung to her other side to whisper with Jessica so fast, I wondered if she'd suffer whiplash. As class continued, Lauren and Jessica passed notes to one another, exchanging looks and shooting me glances I pretended not to notice. I could care less what their petty little minds were wrapped around. I was preoccupied by my own thoughts, and Bella was front and center in them. My head was filled with her scent, and the sight of her in my jacket had been indescribably thrilling. I liked it. Somehow it felt like I had put forth some sort of claim on her, somehow managing to keep both my hair and my ear. I thought of something then and frowned to myself.

Perhaps Rosalie's warning had been in response to that claim. She was observant, I had to give her that, even if I resented complimenting the wench in my mind. I couldn't easily form positive opinions of Rosalie. Or her barracuda mother for that matter. I groaned internally and willed myself elsewhere.

No such luck.

After class, Lauren walked beside me, batting her eyelashes again. "It's too bad about tomorrow," she lamented. "A group of us are going down to First Beach in La Push for a bonfire. I thought you might've wanted to join us."

Not if it was a choice between that and being ripped apart by a pack of wolves and set on fire.

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather come with us instead?" She was pushing herself against my side, her breasts pressing against my arm and gah. I hated it.

"I'm sorry, Lauren," I managed through clenched teeth, and she seemed taken aback by my tone. "It's really not possible."

She blinked, then frowned. "It's Bella, isn't it?"

"Excuse me?" The warning in my voice was cold and hard as steel. I hated her speaking Bella's name that way, as though it were a curse or a profanity. What did she know about Bella?

"What do you even see in her? She's not that pretty."

Said the ugly stepsister in the crew cut.

"Besides, you hated her! Remember how rude she was to you your first day here?"

I gripped Lauren's shoulder and pried her away from my arm. "You are a sad, petty girl Lauren. I pity you."

And I walked away and left her gaping after me in the hallway. My face must have looked like a storm because people hurried and fell over themselves to get out of my way.

What a fucking day.

***

Jasper's glare during gym made me a less than formidable opponent against Emmett during volleyball, which was what we'd been playing that day. I was constantly distracted by the intensity of his gaze, so much so that I didn't notice Emmett was more subdued than usual.

I went to lunch with the buzzing bells of annoyance dancing around my brain, and I sat down at the table with nothing but a lemonade. Jasper clutched his juice box and seemed to be searching for words. Oh boy. Here it comes. Of course, with my luck it would be today that he'd finally say what's been on his mind. Of course. Fucking Murphy's Law.

"Why are you driving Bella to and from school?" he finally managed to haltingly ask, and Emmett paused during his meal to look up at Jasper with a worried frown.

"Jasper, I don't know if Edward's the one you should be asking."

I gave Emmett a grateful half-smile. "He's right, man. Bella asked me for a ride. You should ask her why she did."

Jasper frowned as though he didn't like this answer. "Bella doesn't know what she wants. She doesn't know what she's doing half the time, either. Her decision to ask you probably has no more rhyme or reason than anything else she does."

There was bitterness in his voice, but his words were harsh. "Is that a fair thing to say about her? I mean sure, she's probably not perfection incarnate or anything, but still. That's pretty unkind."

Emmett nodded. "She'd probably kick your ass if she heard you say that."

Jasper's frown deepened and his mouth became a thin line. Clearly, he had ideas of his own. Clearly, he hadn't shared them all. Clearly, he wasn't going to, and clearly, he didn't like it.

"Jasper, I get you're worried about her." I sighed and prepared myself for an admission I didn't like. "Truth is, I worry about her, too." Emmett looked at me sharply, his eyes round with surprise. "She's really just so… small." I frowned, searching for the right words. "And sometimes a little sad. Under all that bad bravado and bitchy attitude, she really seems just like your average girl, and she's your friend so, of course. you want to protect her. I get it."

Jasper's hands were clenched into fists, and if possible his lips became an even thinner line. He didn't look at me. He didn't even speak.

"Edward, Bella's like a kid sister to me." I nodded at Emmett to continue. I had seen some sign of this in the way they interacted already, and Bella had mentioned feeling the same way about him, so it wasn't news. "Just… be careful, okay?"

Again, I nodded at him. Something about the way he was looking at me and the words he'd just spoken reminded me vaguely of something, and the memory and circumstances surrounding it eluded me, but I was determined to remember. It was strange, this overt protectiveness of one small girl. I felt it, too, though, didn't I? Like I always wanted her to be safe and happy?

We sat in awkward silence until Alice came in, and silence became a distant memory. Bella followed soon after, sliding into her chair beside me and stunning us all when she turned to me and spoke. "You wanna come with us to Seattle next week?"

I'd heard of plans being made for a trip to Seattle. I'd participated in the event planning to an extent. I'd already received something of an invitation from Emmett. But her direct invitation to me, her inclusion of me in her plans – though they were plans with friends, in a group, and not really equivalent to say a date or something, the thought of which still terrified me beyond reason – were wonderfully overwhelming. I smiled at her, my best winning smile, and she gaped for a moment. "I'd love to join you in Seattle."

She smiled back and gah. My brain imploded. Jasper took Alice by the wrist and they disappeared together, but they could have gone to hell and I wouldn't have noticed or cared. I was on top of the world.

What a beautiful day.

**AN/**

**I have to let you all know that I love Jasper. I love him a ridiculously large amount. I want his sparkly Southern babies. So no part of this story is or ever will be me hating on Jasper just cuz I don't like him. He just needs to be an ass now and then.**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money ****it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

**I wanna say one thing before I spew forth my brain vomit. (There's a pretty picture for you.) So much curiosity abounds on why Bella is psychotically bitchy, epically speaking. It's a very love/hate relationship with her, where she's like my pet. I love her, but I hate that she pisses all over my rug. (Hey look at that, another pretty picture.) Meaning she isn't perfect, and she's endearingly human to me in a way that SM's Edward Cullen clearly is not (yummy). So my Bella is fucked-up, but she's no vampire. She's just a girl in my story, so I want you all to remember that while you read.**

**I'm going to shut up now. Really.**

Chapter 7 – Blood Type aka "Bella Faints at the Sight of Blood"

We actually walked together to Biology from the cafeteria, conversing and everything, and I wondered if my giddiness – that's right, fucking _giddiness_ – was showing. Lauren glared at us when we came in, but I pointedly ignored her as Bella and I took our seats, still in mid-discussion about plans for Seattle.

"Why is Mallory giving me more of the stink eye than usual?" she suddenly asked, and I rolled my eyes. Inside, I was elated she'd asked. It gave me a chance to flaunt my desirability, though being desired by Lauren wasn't exactly my proudest achievement.

"She tried inviting me to the beach earlier today, and when I excused myself due to prior engagements, she assumed it had something to do with you."

Bella raised her eyebrows. "With me?"

I leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, "Apparently, she thinks you and I are something of an item."

For a moment, I thought she was going to kill me - or Lauren - and my heart tried to abandon ship and escape through my throat. I was about to lose my precarious grip on it and launch the organ, bloody and still beating, at Bella's face when she suddenly grinned, looking at the back of Lauren's head. My heart reluctantly resumed position, and my breathing calmed. Really, this whole fear thing had to stop.

As though sensing her gaze, Lauren turned in her seat to glare at Bella and me, and Bella shot her a smile. She turned to me then, and so achingly deliberately, Bella leaned in towards my face. We already had our heads huddled together, and I was suddenly aware of just how close we were. She was coming closer, and her gaze was locked on my lips, and I nearly had an aneurism. My heart was climbing back up my throat - was she going to kiss me? I was suddenly intoxicated with the closeness, the smell and the presence of Bella. Our lips only an inch apart, she dropped her head ever so slightly and brushed her lips against my jaw.

I prayed that if there were a God, Bella wouldn't notice my body's immediate reaction. My eyes slid shut, and I bit my lip to suppress a groan of delight. My arms burst out in goose bumps, and my Confederate State raised its flag. Fuck me if her lips didn't feel so damn good on my neck, I was hard in a second.

I barely registered the strangled cry of indignation that came from Lauren as Bella leaned back, running her fingers lingeringly over my lips. I kissed them unthinkingly, gripping her hand in mine, and gazing at her from under my lashes, I pressed her fingers to my lips again and again. Her hand was so small, her fingertips so soft. I wondered how they would feel on my face, in my hair, on my arms or linked through my own fingers even. My heart raced with the thought of any of those things being possible. I forgot the rest of the room.

"I guess Mallory really had a thing for you," she whispered quietly, and I took a moment to remember what she was talking about.

Oh fuck. Oh fucking fuckity _fuck_ fuck.

The awareness and self-consciousness struck like an anvil in those old Roadrunner cartoons. I released her hand and swallowed audibly, turning in my seat to best hide my bulging cock from her view. Scrubbing my fingers through my hair I attempted a smile, and Bella smiled back as Banner called the class to order. Lauren was glaring at us, but at Bella especially, as though she were wondering where she could find a horse head for her bed. But I felt a surge of affection for her, this vile creature that had unwittingly caused Bella to pretend, however briefly, that she wanted me. Because I had to remind myself, it was pretend. Bella had been trying to get a rise out of Lauren. It wasn't her fault I had lost myself –Jesus Christ I was losing myself a lot around her – lost myself in the feel of her lips or her fingers.

As Banner began passing out lab supplies, I heard Bella groan. Alarmed, I turned to her. Her face was pale, paler even than usual, and her eyes were wide with… fear? Her hand flew to cover her mouth as she eyed Mike Newton in horror. Puzzled, I looked over to where Newton was frowning at his finger, a droplet of blood visible on the tip. Oh. Blood typing. Banner was waving the indicator card over his head, with Mike Newton's blood already on it. Bella groaned again and placed her head on the table's surface. "Bella?" I placed my hands on her back and searched for her neck. Did she have a fever? Her neck was covered in sweat. Oh God! What was wrong with her?!

All thoughts of having her want me fled in the face of my concern. The fucking irony. Hadn't I just spent the first part of my lunch hour assuring Jasper and Emmet I would take care of her? And here she was, sick or dying or something, and I had no idea why or how to stop it.

"Bella? Are you all right?" I looked up at Banner with alarm in my eyes. He was frowning at Bella, concerned, but somewhat annoyed. I hated him.

"I already know my blood type, Mr. Banner," she offered weakly, and her voice was so small and unlike her that I groaned, too. It was agony, not knowing what was wrong with her.

"Are you feeling faint?" he asked her, his face all annoyance now and no concern. I fucking _loathed_ him.

"Yes, sir," she mumbled, and I grit my teeth. Bella Swan? Faint? The blood? No way.

"Mr. Cullen, why don't you take Bella to the nurse's office, if you please." I looked up at him with my mouth hanging open in shock.

I loved this man.

He was saying something else, but I'd stopped listening, instead scooping Bella into my arms and carrying her out the door at a brisk walk. She gripped my shirt and groaned against me. She felt so good against my chest, and I was so relieved…

"Put me down," she whimpered unconvincingly, and I laughed.

"No way. I'm supposed to take you to the nurse, and I will." It wasn't lost on me the way her body fit perfectly in my arms. It wasn't lost on me at all.

"Please, just put me down for a little bit," she whimpered again, and it was so unlike her to ask so nicely, I couldn't help but comply. Like she was made of glass and lace, I placed her so she was sitting on the edge of the walk, and she leaned over and lay down on her side. I squatted on the ground beside her.

"Bella?" I asked, moving her hair away from her face. She looked so pale, so green, but she was still so beautiful. Her eyes shut, her lips slightly parted as she panted, her hair clinging to her forehead where she was sweating lightly, her hand almost completely obscured by the sleeve of my jacket cupping her cheek. Had I really told Jasper I didn't think she was perfect incarnate? I was a dumb ass. She was absolutely perfect, and my whole body struggled to reach out and take her. My brain barely won out. "Bella, can you hear me?"

"Go to hell," she mumbled, covering her face with her hands. Fucking adorable. "I hate you."

I laughed, seeing her impoliteness for what it was. Embarrassment. "You look like shit," I offered, and my body roared against the lie.

She groaned and peeked from between her fingers. Her Bambi brown eyes looking at me like that, and my jacket and her smell and those million other things compounded together, and I was undone. I leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her temple, stroking her hair again.

"Want me to take you home?" My voice was gravelly with the desire I was battling against.

She moved her hands away from her face, and I realized that in leaning in to kiss her I was practically half on top of her. I watched her throat as she swallowed, and she bit her lip, and I wondered if she was torturing me on purpose. Our faces were inches apart again. No Lauren to torment here. Just us. And she was looking at me like that... I could feel her breath against my cheek. It smelled like cigarettes, pot, cheap scotch and something else. Something distinctly Bella.

She wasn't answering me, and I wondered if I'd actually asked her if she wanted me to take her home or if I had just thought it. As I wondered, I realized the double meaning that could have been found in the question. Had she heard it, too? Had I just unwittingly asked her to bed? And more importantly, was she actually considering it?

"Bella?!"

I looked up to see Jasper come running across the grass, his eyes locked on her, his face contorted in worry and fear I had never thought possible to see on him before. I sat up and away from her, cursing him inwardly.

"Bella, are you okay?" He came to a halt on his knees beside her, and she started to sit up. "What's wrong with her?" He turned to glare at me, and the hatred in his eyes struck me mute for a moment.

"I felt faint in biology class. I'm fine, Jazz." He continued to glare at me, and she reached out unexpectedly and grabbed his face with both her hands, turning his head to face her before smiling sweetly at him. "I'm fine, I promise."

His face softened considerably, and he suddenly looked… tired. My chest ached. What was wrong with me? His hands reached up to cover hers, and he sighed. "Come on, I'll take you home."

Her gaze darted to me then, and she bit her lip again. I swallowed. Something was wrong. I didn't like it at all. She turned back to Jasper and nodded, letting him help her to her feet. "Edward?" Jasper stiffened and looked at me with that hatred in his eyes. Bella eyed us nervously. She saw it there, too. She knew why it was there. "Can you please get my things from the class?"

I nodded to her, trying and failing to reassure her with a smile. Jasper was already walking her to the parking lot, his arm around her waist as she leaned her head against his shoulder. I had thought she felt perfect in my arms, but as I watched them walk away, I realized they looked perfect together. The position looked natural between the two of them, easy and real. They fit. I hated that.

I walked back to Biology class and hastily explained to Banner that I was taking Bella home. He nodded in understanding and offered a smile and best wishes for her hasty recovery. They were both insincere, but I was too frustrated to care. Lauren glared at me as I picked up my bag and Bella's, but I ignored her. As I walked towards Jasper's Cadillac, I saw red on the edges of my vision. I couldn't properly explain it, but I was angry at him for ruining our moment, angry at him for hating me so fiercely. Before this mess with her, I had liked Jasper quite a bit. His friendship had been easy, not forced at all the way friendships in a new town often seemed to be. I had thought of him as a guy I would always get along with and always like hanging out with. Now I loathed him. Just as well, he loathed me, too. Because of Bella.

I saw her sitting in the passenger side of his car, with him leaning against the doorframe talking to her. He had one hand on her face, and she was looking up at him with softness in her eyes. He looked tired, again. I felt no sympathy, instead coming up with the vilest reasons for his being in the parking lot to begin with instead of class where he should have been. He must have been selling crack to school children or something. Surely. When he saw me, he moved away from her, his hand lingering on her face. He was walking towards me, looking stern and unfriendly.

I brushed past him as he stopped a distance from the car with his hand outstretched for Bella's bag, instead placing it in the backseat of his car behind her. He was glaring at me again, but I ignored him and leaned into the doorframe the way he had done to talk to her. "Are you feeling all right?"

She smiled and nodded at me, and I saw with relief there was color in her cheeks again. "I feel a lot better. And it was almost worth it being sick so I could miss gym last period."

I chuckled. "Well, you look less horrible than you did earlier, so I guess you're being honest."

She rolled her eyes at me, and I chuckled again. "Thanks, Edward." She was nothing like she'd been last week. She was funny, fragile, spunky. She was _nice_ to me. She invited me to Seattle. Maybe she had been sick or something, I thought suddenly. She had been cranky. Some external force had been troubling her, bothering her so she was surly to me. Because the Bella that she was now was amazing in every way. The way she had felt against me, the sight of her in my jacket. The scent of her breath and how close our faces had been. The touch of her lips against my jaw line, and the touch of mine against her fingertips. Perfect. In every way she was perfect. This was no inner pussy talk, this was just statement of fact at this point.

"You're very welcome, Bella." Placing another kiss on her temple, I walked away to my car, waving at her over my shoulder as Jasper stomped to the driver's seat and talked furiously at her. She didn't seem to be paying any attention to him, instead looking out of her window with that bored half smile that had made my blood boil a hundred and seven years ago. They were screeching out of the parking lot before I even got to my car, and I shook my head in distaste. Something was up, and I'd no sooner completed the thought before I spotted confirmation of it.

Alice sat on my hood, her legs dangling almost a foot above the ground, her hands twirling around themselves in her lap. "Hey, Alice," I offered with a smile, my spidey senses tingling with nerves. Something was definitely up.

She smiled weakly at me, not really meeting my eyes. "Hey, Edward. Mind if I hitch a ride home with you?"

I scratched the back of my neck. So Alice and I weren't exactly close, but still. Awkwardness was totally uncalled for in this situation. Wasn't it? "I don't mind at all. Get in."

She smiled in gratitude, a little more genuine this time, before bouncing into the passenger seat with an echo of her usual energy. I turned down the stereo, unsure if Alice would appreciate Alexisonfire. "Oh, don't!" I turned to her, alarmed. She blushed and looked at her lap again. "I just like this song."

Okay. So she _did_ appreciate Alexisonfire. Didn't see that one coming. "Where do you live?"

She murmured directions to her house, shyly avoiding my eyes the whole way, and I was unsettled. When I tried to start a conversation, she turned up the stereo and sang along, seeming to invent perfect harmonies to George Pettit's choruses. She hardly spoke at all, and her whole body remained rigid the whole way there. Maybe the pod people got her.

"Alice, hold on a minute," I ventured, placing a hand on her shoulder as she made to get out of the car. She jumped at the contact, looking at me with wide cornered eyes. "Can I talk to you for just a second?"

She laughed nervously, shrugging my hand off, and I self-consciously put it on the steering wheel and cleared my throat. Start somewhere safe…

"So how come you needed a ride home?"

So much for starting safe. She looked away quickly, and I heard her voice crack slightly. "Jasper was supposed to take me home. He drove me to school, so…"

The shitfaced fucker. He ditched her to fuck up my moment with Bella? So not cool. I watched her form her thoughts, fight a silent battle, chew her lip mercilessly, and my heart went out to her. She'd been so overwhelmingly nice to me that first day, overwhelming being the key term, but nice being up there, too. I liked Alice, quite a bit if I let myself admit as much, and I was angry at Jasper for making her sad, because he had made her sad today. I saw it in every little inconsistent nuance of her demeanor now. "I hope Bella feels better," I mumbled lamely. She nodded but didn't turn around to look at me. "Bella is…"

She turned to face me now and… what was that in her eyes?

I swallowed. "Bella is… nice, right?" She raised her eyebrows at me and I cleared my throat and tried again. "I mean… she's okay under all the bullshit and stuff, isn't she? Is she…?"

"Worth it?" I was embarrassed by her word choice, but her eyes held a hint of humor in them. I nodded wordlessly, cracking a small smile, and she sighed and smiled back before looking sadly at her hands. "Bella isn't perfect. Not by a long shot. She's kind of… been through a lot."

"A lot like how?" My curiosity was eating me alive.

"Well," she shifted in her seat and turned to face me, and her eyes were serious and heavy. I waited with baited breath, because Alice was getting herself ready to talk, and it was going to be epic. "Her mom walked out on them when she was a kid, right? So it was just Bella and Charlie for her whole life. Her mom was kind of flaky, I guess, some kind of free spirit or something, so she was always bailing on Bella. There was this one Christmas where she forgot to pick her up from the airport, and Charlie had to fly out to Phoenix and bring her back home, and she was like ten! So her mom gets married two years ago, right, and Bella flies out finally to meet the stepfather, who is some minor league baseball loser that's like half Renee's age, and the bastard comes on to her! So she freaks out and tells her mom, and her mom doesn't believe her, accuses her of trying to hurt her in revenge for all the times she wasn't there, turns around and tries to make it out like Bella was the one seducing him or something, and Bella got on a plane to Seattle and just... disappeared for a while. Rose went out to get her, and she was just all messed up, and they were gone for a month, and Emmett doesn't talk about it. Then Jacob Black was there and all this shit happened… the point is, Edward, it's fucked up. Everything, it's always been so fucked up for her. Nothing has ever come easy to Bella. It's like… everything hurts." She wrapped her skinny arms around herself and shuddered, and I sat stunned and watched her. This wasn't like Lauren's gossip. This wasn't malicious or spiteful. I'd thought once that Bella Swan had everything her way, but the way Alice told it, nothing ever went her way. "Bella's been through a lot," she repeated weakly, and her voice shook. "She just needs someone to stick around, you know?"

I nodded slowly, but I wasn't sure I understood. Maybe I did. A little more. A little better. I knew more about Bella, so it was a start, right? So did it explain her? All her psychotic manias and the raving lunacy? Not so much. I probably had more questions now than ever. But maybe it explained the bitch part of her. The part that went out to hurt people. The part that wasn't sorry. Carlisle's warnings had been plentiful when I was fourteen. All that talk about how bullies were only afraid of being bullied. Was Bella afraid?

"You won't tell anyone I said anything, will you?" Alice's eyes were pleading, and her lip shook ever so slightly. I knew I couldn't say no, and I couldn't ask her to tell me more. "I just thought you should know. You should know what you're getting yourself into." She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince me, but I nodded all the same. She nodded back, forcing another weak smile. "Okay. Thanks, Edward. For the ride. And for keeping a secret." She almost fell over herself getting out of the car, probably rushing before I had the chance to stop her again, and I watched her run to her front door without really seeing much. My mind was somewhere else.

I don't remember driving to my house, but I remember thinking about her again. Getting out of my car, I took the stairs two at a time and barricaded myself in my room. I played Brand New - loud - and stretched onto my bed to go over the events of the day again, lingering over the memories of her. I frowned as my thoughts turned to Jasper then, his interruption and the look on his face, his antagonism towards me and his fierce possessiveness of Bella. Alice had looked almost heartbroken. Her revelations had painted parts of Bella I had never imagined could exist before, and the picture of her shifted and changed and was unrecognizable. I had no idea what to make of it. And suddenly, just like that, I remembered why Emmett's words at lunch had been so familiar.

Back in Chicago, I had briefly dated a girl named Wendy Duncan. Wendy Duncan's older brother, Jared, had been the captain of the baseball team. He had heard about my dating his sister and come up to me one day – out of the blue – to give me 'the talk'. His face had been set in a resigned expression, knowing he couldn't prevent me from dating her, but also the fierce warning that if I hurt her, he'd be all over my ass.

That's how Emmett had looked at lunch when he'd asked me to be careful. That was how Rosalie had looked when she'd told me to watch it.

I realized with a start that they had been giving me their reluctant blessings to date their friend.

And Jasper had very firmly refused to give me any such thing.

With newfound annoyance and anger, I picked up my cell phone and scrolled to Carlisle's number. He answered after seven rings. Count them, seven. His own son. I could have been dying. "Edward, is this important?" No polite hellos for this man. Oh no.

"Esme Platt invited us to dinner tomorrow night. Are you free?"

Suddenly, Carlisle was asking someone to please give him a minute. There was the sound of a door closing, and then, quieter. "Esme invited us to dinner? The both of us? Where? When?"

I ground my teeth. "At her house. She said to be there at six, and that you already know where it is." I paused. "Do you?"

"Yes, I know where it is," Carlisle admitted reluctantly. Really. Nasty.

"Should I let them know to expect us?"

Carlisle cleared his throat nervously. Ick. "Yes, Edward. Go ahead and let them know we'd _love_ to be there."

"Got it," I growled, hanging up on him without waiting to say "bye." Seriously, of all the women Carlisle could have had, and there had been quite a few ready to throw themselves at him after Mom died, he had to choose Rosalie's mother? He was handsome - even I didn't hate him enough not to notice that. He was a doctor, and more successful than most other doctors his age. His status as a widower raising his only son all alone also played him up. Women loved that shit. Esme very obviously got into it, too. But this time, Carlisle was eating it up. He'd never expressed interest in a woman before, and there had been a time, when I was younger, when I had wished he would. I'd eventually given up on the notion that he'd ever find someone, and now _this_.

I dialed Rosalie's number, reluctant to have this conversation. She answered in a tone that told me she felt the same.

"My dad says we'd love to join you and your mother for dinner tomorrow night."

She cursed, sighing. "I figured as much. Listen I hate to ask, but I kinda don't want to have this conversation with Esme, and I certainly won't ask your father but…" she cursed again. "Does he do this often? Like, date all the time? I mean, is he going to screw with Esme and dump her? Because if that's the kind of guy he is, you know, let's get it out in the open now."

I groaned. "Rosalie, Carlisle hasn't expressed interest in a woman since my mom died. Not once. He isn't playing Esme."

"Oh." She sounded relieved. "I'm… sorry. I didn't know your mom died. I thought-"

"Don't worry about it," I interrupted her, and she sighed again. "What about your mom? Is she gonna play my dad?" I felt like a parent looking after my child, rather than a child talking about his parent.

Rosalie barked a laugh. "Usually, I'd say hell yeah, but she's never invited a guy over to the house before. That and she's never gone after a guy with a kid. You know, baggage. I mean, I won't say she's been virginal since having me, but… this seems different."

I appreciated her honesty. "Thanks. I'll remember that."

"Right." The silence was awkward. "So I guess I'll see you tomorrow night."

"Yeah. See you then."

I hung up, groaning to myself. That had been a painful conversation to have. If Carlisle and Esme hit it off, there'd be more of this? Or would they leave Rosalie and me out of it? A horrific thought struck me. What if they ended up getting married? Rosalie and I would be step-siblings? I groaned again.

I wasn't looking forward to this at all, but at least it was taking my mind off Bella.


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money ****it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

Chapter 8 - "You Probably Have Better Places To Be"

Saturday night, Rosalie and I were forced into awkward conversation until we were eventually forgotten completely. Carlisle and Esme had more than just hit it off. They had fallen into animated conversation about their favourite books, movies and works of art as though they were long-lost friends. Rosalie and I had fallen silent and stared at our parents, sometimes with wonder, sometimes with disgust. At one point we exchanged a glance, and I could see so much of my own internal frustration and indecision about watching this mirrored in her own eyes that I smiled at her in support. She had apparently sensed it, too, and had smiled back, and a strange silent camaraderie was formed. Eventually, I gently reminded Carlisle that it was late, and we should go, and he looked abashed and ashamed as he hurriedly agreed, assuring and reassuring Esme that we'd had a wonderful time, and that her home was lovely, and Rosalie was a fine young lady.

I had rolled my eyes at that part, and Rosalie had grinned and promised to see me at school on Monday. Where we shall not speak of this night, I silently added.

Carlisle hummed to himself for the better part of the drive home, which I had to endure in the passenger seat of his Mercedes instead of in the driver's seat of my own car. "She's lovely, isn't she? And quite the cook."

Oh boy. Here it came. "Yeah, Dad. She seemed really nice."

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. "If you like, we can have them over to dinner next week. Sort of return the favor."

I groaned internally. "Listen, Dad, why don't you take her out someplace instead? I mean, our house isn't even fully furnished yet, and neither one of us really cooks. Doesn't it just make more sense?"

Carlisle blinked at me in surprise before clearing his throat and shifting nervously in his seat. "Of course. Where would you like to go?"

I rolled my eyes. "_I'm_ not going, obviously. And neither is Rosalie." Carlisle opened his mouth to speak, and I beat him to it. "She likes you, okay? Just ask her out already. She'll say yes, I guarantee it."

There was an emotion I couldn't quite place in Carlisle's face when he looked at me again. It reminded me of when my mother had first died, and Carlisle had looked at me as though unsure what to do with me now.

"I'm okay with it," I promised him. "I don't mind you dating her."

He swallowed and cleared his throat, turning back to the road. "Thanks, son." I thought I saw his eyes glisten, but of course it was just the light. Cullen men didn't fucking cry.

***

Sunday I was woken up by the buzzing of my phone. Who the fuck was calling me so early? I answered with a garbled sound that couldn't really be called a 'hello'.

"Jeez, Cullen, you're not Sleeping Beauty you know."

Bella! My mind reeled and tried to awaken my battered thoughts. I tried sitting up in bed, but that didn't help. "Bella?" Disoriented was one thing, but come on! You knew that part already!

"Yeah, Bella. You know what time it is?" She spoke slowly, like to a mentally incompetent child.

I checked my bedside clock. "Um. Noon?"

She chuckled. "Yeah, noon. Very good. Rough night?"

I rubbed my face in an attempt to clear my head. "Um, not so much. I guess it could've been worse."

She laughed. "So Esme didn't get drunk and throw herself at Rose in tears?"

I winced. Was that what I should have been looking for? And to think I had been merely worried about her interactions with _my father_. "No, no one got drunk, no one threw themselves anywhere and no one cried. I think she and Carlisle are going to see each other again."

She was quiet for a while, then, "Esme is a good person. Just known to get a little wild is all."

I nodded before realizing she couldn't see me. "Yeah, I guess I can understand that." I cleared my throat. I'd been meaning to ask, but there seemed to be no right way to bring it up with Rosalie. And yet, I was curious. Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself to ask Bella, and the question came out in a rush. "Where's Rosalie's dad?"

Bella snorted. "Seattle. I'm surprised you haven't heard. It was quite the Forks scandal."

I frowned. "What happened?"

"Rosalie's dad is Howard Hale, the owner and president of Hale Tech."

Whoa. "That huge electronics conglomerate?"

"One and the same. Esme did some work for him and they ended up having an affair. He was already married with three kids, and when she got pregnant it was a huge deal covering it up. Esme promised to keep it out of the news so long as he supported his daughter and let her inherit from him. She's in his will and everything, so apparently she's setting up to strike it rich when he's dead. But she never sees him; they don't have contact at all. She says she gets all the benefits of a loaded dad without any of the hassle."

I absorbed this information. It sounded like more of those rumors, those hearsay things I had heard about Bella from Lauren, but Bella and Rosalie had been friends for so long, and Bella didn't spread gossip. It was so out of character I couldn't even picture her doing it. "So Esme Platt…"

"Was never married." Bella sighed, and I could almost hear her wondering whether to tell me more. "Listen," she finally spoke, and I frowned at the tone of her voice. "I'm only telling you this because your dad's getting involved with her. You repeat it and I'll end you, got that?"

"Sure," I muttered, skeptical.

"Rose says her mom really loved Howard Hale. That it broke her heart what he did and how he treated her. She says it's probably why Esme's never let anyone in. She doesn't want to get hurt again. You understand?"

I frowned. "Yeah, I understand."

She sighed. "Poor Rose, she's probably all sorts of fucked up about this."

I snorted. "This is the part where you tell me she's a little tough on the outside, but she's still a good person, and I should be nice to her, isn't it?"

She gave a snort of her own in response. "Fuck no! Rose is a raving bitch, and if anything, I'll need to ask her to be nice to you!" She gave a little giggle that made me smile. "Then again, it's why I love her so."

I laughed in wonder. "You are a strange girl. I don't know how your brain works."

She giggled again. "Good." There was a pause. "I'm sorry about ditching you like that Friday. No hard feelings, right?"

I smiled. "No hard feelings at all. Jasper was worried about you. I understand that."

She laughed nervously. So strange, hearing her nervous. "We're still on for Seattle then? We're thinking Friday we'll leave right after school. You'll come, right?"

"Of course." Too eager? "Sure, I got nothing else planned anyway."

"Hmm." She sighed then and her voice brightened. "So you'll come pick me up for school tomorrow?"

My heart fluttered. "You want me to?"

"Yeah." Her voice was surprised. "Well, I still don't have my car back anyway, so I could use a ride." Was she shy? Over-eager like I was?

"I'll pick you up," I reassured her. "Bring more of your CDs."

She laughed, a sound of relief and genuine delight. "I'll do that. I'll see you tomorrow morning."

"Sure thing."

"Bye, Edward."

That night she asked me again if I loved her, and the Bella of my dreams walked away towards the dark end of a tunnel. At its entrance, a man stood in the shadows, and she took his arm and walked away without looking back.

***

Monday morning I overslept. She was sitting on her porch when I arrived, frantic, mere minutes before the bell was due to ring at school. She had her hands in the pocket of her jacket – _my_ jacket – and was staring intently at her sneakers. She looked up with a blank expression when I parked, and got up slowly, dragging her feet to my car as she continued to stare at her sneakers. When she got in the car, I peeled out of her driveway before she even got the door shut all the way.

"I'm so sorry, Bella. I know we're late. I overslept, and that almost never happens. Are you mad?" Of course, she's mad. She's Bella fucking Swan. She's furious. Oh God. She's going to shave my head. I whimpered – don't fucking judge me because Bella Swan would make you whimper, too, if she was mad at your sleeping ass – and glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. She was staring at her lap, her hands still in her pockets. She shrugged, not looking up or acknowledging that I'd spoken with any other word or action.

I swallowed convulsively, terrified by her silence. Any minute now she was going to pull out a knife or a set of brass knuckles or something and I was gonna get it. Any minute now…

I nearly missed the entrance to the school parking in my panic. When I parked, the lawn was empty. Everyone was already in class. She sat silently beside me, and I realized she hadn't moved since she got in. "Bella?"

She looked up at me, almost like she was surprised I'd spoken to her.

"Are you okay?"

She blinked and dropped her gaze, looking at my chest instead of my eyes. She opened her mouth and closed it, shook her head and shrugged again. We sat in a long silence, me waiting for her to speak, her for who knew what reason. "I'm not someone you should spend time with, Edward."

Fuck. She knew I liked her. She still fucking hated me. She was going to kill me. I gaped at her and decided to play dumb. "I don't… think I really… I don't understand."

"I know, I just…" She bit her lip, still not looking at my eyes, and my heart surged with discomfort and panic. "I just can't help who I am."

I nodded. Maybe this wasn't about me. What a foreign thought… I had no idea what she was talking about, but the words escaped, "I like who you are." Shit. Did I just say that out loud?

She looked at me with wide shocked eyes, her mouth open in a little "O" shape of surprise and disbelief. She clapped her hands over it, and I saw there, just on the very tops of her cheeks, the most beautiful blush I'd ever seen on a human being. Her face turned rosy and her eyes sparkled, and I swallowed because dammit, she was dazzling me again, and I really wanted to just kiss her…

And I was leaning in and she had her hand over my lips all of a sudden, and her eyes were still wide and sparkling and she was still blushing, but she looked determined and angry and terrified, and I could feel her pulse through her fingers over my lips.

"Shut up! Just shut up! Because you don't know the first thing about me, and maybe I eat puppies for breakfast and spread small pox infected blankets around during my spare time, and you don't know, so how can you say that?"

She removed her hand from my mouth, blushing some more and looking at her hands in her lap, and I wanted to touch her or hold her or something, and make her happy, just a little bit if I could. But her blush deepened and then she was pushing her door open and walking briskly – she stumbled once and my entire body jerked in reaction, my fingers reaching out to catch her – and disappearing into the woods on the edge of the school grounds. I had a sudden feeling that I'd lost her somehow. Which was crazy. Because I never had her, and I couldn't follow her no matter how much I wanted to.

***

My day was grey, the haze everywhere. I dragged my feet from class to class, knowing that whatever brief respite of joy Bella had given me through her company was good and over now. Just when I started thinking we could be something. Just when I started thinking I had a chance. I sat at lunch with my shoulders drooping, my world tunnel visioned into the small space between my hands, resting on the table top the way Bella's hands always seemed to be. The thought just made me feel stupid. It made me feel like a joke. It made the inner pussy cry. Alice put her tiny white hand on mine, her fingers cold, and I looked up to see her sympathetic eyes. Jasper looked… smug. The bastard. I wanted to punch his face in suddenly. I wondered if it would make me feel better, but Alice's wide eyed stare held me back, her little hand weighing me down.

In biology class, Lauren turned around completely and faced me, her eyes darting nervously to Bella's empty seat and the door, her flirtatious smile wobbling uncertainly in the face of my dead demeanor. She had to take me by the arm and physically lead me to my next class, and I let her with as much life as I'd had doing anything else. And then the day was over, and I knew it was time to go home, but I couldn't bring myself out of the stupor enough to walk to my car. I stood by my locker until the halls were empty, then I sat down right there on the floor, not ready to face the thick scent of her all over the inside of my car.

"Edward?"

I looked up, astonished, to see her standing there. She was a vision, her hair dripping wet, her hands shoved deep into the pockets of the jacket that I gave her, an extension of myself. She was looking at me with puzzled eyes, her full lips at the mercy of her little white teeth, and her face flushed with something. Cold. Excitement. Exertion. Embarrassment. I should be the one that was embarrassed. I felt my own cheeks heating, and I knew I was blushing, too.

She blinked and looked away, making a stiff uncomfortable gesture with her shoulders. "I'm ready to go home now if you are."

Lifeline. Hope. Maybe even more. Maybe something special. I don't know what I felt, but the smile I gave her suddenly was easy, was natural, like I'd been waiting all day to hear her say those words. I nodded, standing up and pushing my own hands into my pockets to keep them from doing anything presumptuous or stupid. I walked by her to the car, and every step was joy and agony rolled into one. When we were both seated in my Volvo, her scent blasted at me in waves, her essence echoing around the space like a trapped sound wave. Bella. Bella. Bella. Fucking Bella. She was going to be the death of me, this small, fragile, crazy and dangerous little girl. No, not a little girl, not really. Woman. Almost full-grown. I maybe hadn't ever met someone like that before. I maybe wanted her because she was different like that. Dangerous, stupid and almost full-grown. Bella. Bella. Bella.

"I know I'm not perfect," she whispered once, quietly, staring at her hands folded in her lap, playing with the sleeves of my jacket. "I just can't keep trying and failing anymore." Almost like she was talking to herself. Almost like she was pretending I wasn't there. And maybe it was easier for her to talk to me that way, but at least she was talking to me. At least she didn't hate me. The thought of saying the wrong thing kept me from saying anything at all.

And then I was pulling up in her drive and my heart sank. No cruiser. But there was her truck. And there was a big black motorcycle. And there was a tall, smug-looking Jacob Black. Bella hissed beside me, chewing her lower lip, but not getting out of the car. I waited for her to say something. I waited for her to make the next move.

Jacob Black was watching her with raised eyebrows, his face looking smug, but his eyes flashing dangerously. The way he looked at her, like he was reading her mind and bored by what he found there, it made my skin crawl. I wanted to punch him in the teeth.

"Thanks for the ride, Edward," she whispered, and I turned to look at her, stunned. That was it? Just thanks and then going back to whatever the fuck she had up her ass before she invaded my car and my life? Before she sprayed her hair smell all over my fucking seats?

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I snapped, and my heart beat wildly as I realized that I really would lose her at this rate, even the little gaps of time we shared, everything would be gone, and she'd be out of my life like some passing infection.

She looked at me and her eyes were dead, empty, silent and deep. "What do you want me to say? My truck is fixed, and you're not stuck with me anymore. You don't have to inflict my company on your sorry self." She turned abruptly and was out of the car before I could blink, walking towards Jacob Black with her eyes on her feet, walking away from me.

She walked right into Jacob Black's waiting arms, and he scooped her up to plant a kiss on the corner of her mouth. She blushed but didn't smile back. "You haven't been to see me in too long, Bells. I had to drive up and get you myself." And he grinned at me.

"Bella!" I didn't even realize I'd gotten out of the car, but she was looking at me again, her eyes shocked, her face an animated sculpture of surprise. Jacob Black grinned wider as I came closer, placing his hand on the back of her neck, cupping it possessively as he played with the curly strands of hair there.

"You're the new kid, aren't you?"

I looked at him with annoyance. "Right. And you're Jacob Black."

He threw his head back and laughed, and Bella bit her lip and blushed some more. I suppressed a growl, because it should have been my hand on the back of her neck, stroking it tenderly instead of tightening my grip on it. "I guess my reputation precedes me, then. I assure you, most of it is untrue." He winked at me in an exaggerated gesture of familiarity and friendliness.

I stiffened and suppressed another growl. _Something_ about this guy just rubbed me the wrong way. Natural enemies or some biological polarity. _Something._ He made my blood boil, and it took every ounce of willpower in my being to not throw myself at him in a fit of rage for touching _her_ like that, like she was his, like everyone present knew it.

"So how do you like Forks so far, Edward?"

He wasn't seriously making small talk. "Fine. Some parts of it better than others."

He grinned, his teeth straight and white, and _God_ I wanted to punch him. "I hope Bella here hasn't been giving you _too_hard a time. She can be feisty sometimes, see." He rubbed her neck possessively again and she ducked her head as though to shrug him off, though his hand remained firmly in place. "But once you get to know the right buttons, she can be sweet as a lamb." He grinned wider, pulling her closer so she was practically buried into his side.

I made a fist and ignored the ringing in my ears. My eyes stayed focused on Bella's face, her cheeks red and her big brown eyes looking at my shoes, and I silently begged her to do something, to say something, to deny Jacob Black the sick pleasure I knew he was gleaning from taunting me like this. She wouldn't meet my gaze. Maybe she couldn't.

With a last curt nod and a strangled sound that might have been a word of farewell, I turned on my heel and left, not looking back as I raced out of the driveway and put as much distance as I could between Bella and myself, as fast as my Volvo would take me from her, and away from Jacob Black's long copper fingers wrapped around her slender pale neck.

***

Chapter 8.5 - -

"Alice?"

"Hello?"

Her voice was confused on the phone, sort of dazed and caught off-guard. I cleared my throat nervously. "Hey, Alice, it's Edward. Bad time?"

"Oh!" There was a dull thud and a soft curse. "No, not a bad time. I just wasn't… you know." She laughed nervously, and I did the same. How did I manage to find these scenarios of perfect awkwardness?

"Well, I wanted to ask you something, if it's all right with you?" I made it sound like a question, hoping the shy uncertainty would win me some brownie points. Girls loved that shit, and Alice was a girl, so I saw no problem with my reasoning.

She clicked her tongue, sighing. "Is this about Bella again?"

I winced. That transparent, huh? Beautiful. "Sort of. It's mostly about Jacob Black?" I again made a question.

Alice hissed through her teeth. "Jesus, Edward, you trying to get yourself killed? Jasper would shoot you if he heard you talking about Black." She clicked her tongue again, and I waited patiently. "Why do you ask?"

I cleared my throat. To lie or not to lie? To lie, perchance to have it bite you in the ass? Aye, there's the rub. "He made an appearance today when I dropped Bella home. I get a… bad vibe off him. I don't know, it doesn't make sense that Jasper would look the other way on this shit and yet rip my head off for driving the girl to school." I stopped myself when I realized what I was saying, who I was saying it about and who I was saying it to. There was an awkward pause and I filled it with an embarrassed admittance. "It's not like I stick my tongue down her throat." Or ever will at this rate. Fucking smooth operator that I am.

The silence on Alice's end was deafening, though when I strained my ears I could hear her breathing pick up. "Well Black is… mostly harmless… I guess. I don't know, Edward, he and Bella have known each other since they were babies." I knew this already but said nothing. "He isn't good for Bella. He was very possessive about her, I guess. We weren't really friends when they were together, but Rosalie told me some of the story later. Like, Black's got an unhealthy obsession with her or something. Like if anyone tried to move in on her he'd lose his freaking mind."

I suppressed a snort. Sounded like Jasper to me. "So why doesn't Bella ditch him?"

Alice sighed. "I don't know. But I think Rosalie made it sound like she owes him something or… I don't know. I just don't know." And just like that I knew the conversation was over. I sighed into the phone, and Alice sighed back. "I'm sorry, Edward. But maybe you're going to have to figure the rest out on your own."

Yeah. Maybe I did.

***

For the next two days Bella didn't show up to school. Jasper and I sat in tense silence, avoiding looking at one another because fuck, one of us was going to get punched in the face and really fucking soon. At this point, we weren't really fooling each other, and from the looks on their faces and the awkward conversations at lunch, we weren't fooling anyone else either.

I skipped last period and went home early, too annoyed and angry and confused to put myself through calculus. I drove blindly, only able to focus a small part of my attention on what I was doing and secretly hoping for a fatal accident so I could just be done with it. This shit was getting old. As I pulled up to my empty garage, I was just congratulating myself on getting home without hurting myself or Jasper, when I spotted someone at the door, the sight of which just floored me.

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

A shrug. "I figured you'd be at school for another hour or so."

"So that makes it okay for you to be here then, so long as no one is home?"

She gave me her bored half-smile and my heart rate picked up. "You want me to leave?"

I cursed myself and scrubbed my hand through my hair, because fuck, I didn't want her to leave. Because I fucking missed her, and I had wanted to see her, but she had left me high and dry and I was a man! Shit, men never took that fuckery. I said nothing.

When the silence stretched into uncomfortable, Bella sighed, producing a pack of cigarettes from her jacket pocket, and it wasn't the jacket I'd given her. It was some hideous denim affair with large copper buttons, and it looked like shit, but she wore it like some fucking Gia Carangi reincarnation, and it looked hot and I hated that. I had wanted her to only look hot in _my_ jacket. She lit up and offered me the pack without looking at me, and I tensely took a stick, letting her light it for me. "I'll go."

And she brushed past me and suddenly, there was a wave of Bella smell, and the oranges and flowers were all around me and everywhere and before I knew it I had her by the arms, and her back was pressed into my chest and my cigarette was burning a hole through my porch but I didn't care. _Don't go. You always fucking go. Don't go._

I couldn't speak, and she didn't say anything either, and I couldn't see her face or her eyes and her hair hung over her shoulders, and I stared at the nape of her neck and wanted to nuzzle that spot because she should have been mine, but she was Jacob Black's or Jasper Whitlock's or anyone else's but not mine. Mine, not mine, mine, not mine. Mine. Mine.

"Stay."

She tensed in my grip, so I knew she heard me. "I can't just stay, Edward."

I swallowed. Total rejection. Absolute shut out. Releasing her like I'd been burned, I tried to backtrack, salvaging my wounded and humiliated pride. My ego hurt. "Fuck, Swan. Why would you stay? I'm sure you've got better places to be." Fucking smooth.

She turned around to look at me, her eyes wide but her mouth set. "Come with me. Let's go to Seattle. Phoenix. Chicago. Anywhere! Let's just go." My jaw moved. My throat was dry.

She smiled.

"But then again, maybe you've got better places to be, too." She shook her head, still smiling that disgusting half-smile and jogged off my porch to a little red motorcycle I hadn't noticed tucked beside a hedge. "Come get me for school tomorrow." Her voice was haughty, confident, and I knew I would obey. She threw a helmet on, kick started the thing and drove away, and I stood on my porch and let her. Because I would always be a fucking coward.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money ****it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

Chapter 9 - Scary Stories aka "Moments"

She was wearing my jacket again the next morning when I pulled up in front of her house. Her decrepit red truck was parked out there, mocking me. Jacob Black's ever-watchful presence, looming over my days.

She slammed the door shut a little too hard when she got in and I growled at her. "Watch it, Swan."

"Pussy wheels can't take it?" She smirked at me, but her eyes were angry at me again. That fucking anger.

I growled at her some more. "Well, if it isn't good enough for Your Highness…."

She rolled her eyes and pulled out her CD case. Her shoulders were tense like mine.

"What are we listening to today?" I asked awkwardly. Why was it so thick? It had been easier just a few days ago, hadn't it?

She smiled at the stereo as a horse neighed in my speakers. "Luca Benedetti's _Blue Valentine_."

"Who?"

She glared at me and clenched her jaw, and I fought to keep another growl from escaping and ripping her face off. I wanted her. I hated her. She was here. She was all over my life like melted butter on your favourite jeans. I didn't want her to go. "Just accept the light, Cullen. I promise not to hurt your head too much."

I sneered in response, and the music couldn't drown out the tension of all the things we wouldn't say to each other. In fact, it made it worse when I paid attention to the words of the song. "Is he calling himself a liar?"

Bella smirked, then looked sad, and her mood swings were going to give me whiplash. She didn't answer this question, either, and it joined the ranks of all the unanswered Bella questions in my head. They echoed in our space and blinded us. I couldn't unglue my lips to speak again, and we drove to school in silence.

When we arrived she again slammed her door too hard, and I watched her walk away with a quiet resignation. Alice was at my side almost instantly, and I couldn't help but smile at her.

"How she cons you into driving her everywhere I'll never figure."

I shrugged almost shyly. "I don't mind driving her. It's the sheer insanity that gets to me."

Alice giggled and bumped shoulders with surprising strength, linking her arm in mine and leading me to the woods. "A morning toke will ease the pain," she promised, and I made no argument. Chances were she was right.

And she was.

But even though the edge was taken off the morning, by the time lunch rolled around I was all nerves again, wondering if this was going to finally be the day Bella Swan killed me. Or worse – _shaved_ me. But she didn't come to lunch, and she wasn't in biology either. I was beginning to worry for an entirely different set of reasons, wondering where she was, why nobody seemed to notice or care when she disappeared like that, and by the time the final bell rang my knee was bouncing compulsively. I walked slowly to my locker, and even more slowly to my car, hoping to give her enough time to be there, to ambush me with my keys in her hands or a smirk and a verbal low blow. As I trudged to the parking lot, my eyes scanned the heads of the student body, and with a catch in my breath I found her.

She stood next to Jasper, talking quietly to him. He had his hands shoved deep into his pockets, a concerned frown on his face. She was toeing a patch of grass and looking sheepish, staring at his shoes. I swallowed thickly and walked slowly over. He said something that made her smile and shrug, and he reached out a hand to touch her arm. The touch was so casual, yet so intimate. I lost my footing for a moment and faltered. When she looked up at him and smiled more broadly, I second-guessed my decision to approach them. Maybe I should turn around and go home.

I had no sooner completed the thought before she turned to me, abruptly and directly, as though I had called her name. Our eyes met, and she blinked rapidly before covering Jasper's hand with one of her own and saying something quickly. She was walking towards me. I was rooted to the spot.

"I won't be needing a ride home," she said quickly, running nervous hands through her hair. I nodded, maybe waiting for an explanation. She wouldn't look at me. "Jazz is giving me a lift so, you know, don't wait for me or anything."

I opened my mouth. I closed it again. What could I say? Nothing. I nodded again, and she looked at me finally. I had to look away before I lost myself in her eyes.

Without looking back I walked to my car, and then I was in my room, with my arm over my eyes in my bed, and I had no recollection of getting there. Behind my closed lids I discerned the fading light through the window, then the darkness, and I didn't move or open my eyes. I must have drifted to sleep eventually, because she was smiling at me.

"Do you love me, Edward?" Shit. Who knew anymore?

The startling sound of my phone wrenched me awake, and I was grateful because I didn't think I could watch her walk away from me anymore. I answered without opening my eyes.

"Hello?"

Bella?

"Edward?"

I shook the sleep from my eyes and cleared my throat into the phone. "Bella? Is that you?" Is it really you? Because I know I was just dreaming of you, and if you're not real now I think a part of me will die forever.

"Yeah, it's me." I was sitting upright in my bed now, squinting at the clock on my nightstand. Three-thirty in the morning. Jesus. "I'm sorry I woke you."

No, don't be. "No, don't be." I winced. The word vomit was practically unstoppable when I was this disoriented.

"Oh. I would've called sooner, I just left my phone at home, and I didn't want to wait in case the morning was too late, and well, maybe I should've just texted you but God, I didn't think of that. Fuck. I'm an idiot." She sighed into the phone, and I bit my lip. She sounded so frustrated. So unlike herself. Insecure, small. Was that what I sounded like to her?

"Bella?"

"Yeah, I'm here." She cleared her throat. "So I was wondering if maybe you wanted to drive me to school tomorrow. I mean, you don't have to, it's just a favor, and I could drive myself so you wouldn't be inconveniencing me by saying 'no', and well, maybe you don't feel like it if it's out of the way or something so feel free to just tell me off and put the phone down and you know, I'm an idiot. Fuck, Edward." She sighed again and cleared her throat. My chest constricted for her. "Do you want to drive me to school, Edward?"

"Sure, Bella. I'd love to." Well shit, who's the idiot now?

She sighed and gave a small relieved laugh. "Thanks. I'm sorry I woke you. It won't happen again. Right. So I'll see you tomorrow. Bye." And she was gone before I could say a word in response.

I threw myself back into my pillows and stared at the ceiling. Hot and cold, yes and no, psycho or sweet insecure girl, afraid or angry, and I didn't get it. I didn't get _her._ I couldn't imagine ever understanding Bella Swan. But I was a sucker, and I was an idiot, and the next day, I was going to pick her up for school. Because I liked her. Because I needed her. Somehow. And I should have known then that I should seek therapy or something, because clearly I was just as fucked up as she was. But I needed her. And it kinda sounded like she might have needed me, too.

***

The following few weeks went by in a daze of smoking, drinking, school and Bella. While I waited with bated breath for her to flip out again and reveal her dark nature to me – the non-kinky kind – she never did. Something in me relaxed around her, and she relaxed around me in response. We found a system that worked for us.

I picked her up every morning and took her to school, and then drove her home in the afternoons. We hardly talked about anything important, though she often spoke very seriously about Grace Slick and why she really _was_ a goddess. Sometimes in the mornings we sat in the woods with whoever else was there, smoking up and devising elaborate conspiracy theories on the existence of Oprah clones. We teased Lauren often, touching or whispering or doing anything we felt like to give her the wrong impression about us. The games thrilled me more than they should have, but Bella never seemed to notice. Over the weekends we met up at Alice's or Rosalie's, and once at my place, getting stupid and playing family-oriented board games. I didn't try to kiss her again, especially because everyone else was suddenly very aware of the two of us.

Alice and I formed a quiet understanding, and whereas with the group she began to gear her soliloquies more towards my interests when she would sing at me, when we were alone we spoke very little, enjoying one another silently. The more I watched Bella and Jasper interact, the more I appreciated Alice on a whole new level. Small as she was, she was a bigger man than I was. I knew if it had been me, I wouldn't have been able to take it.

Rosalie ended up nicer to me, too. We continued to exchange awkward phone calls after Carlisle and Esme started dating, and Carlisle and I were over at her place for Thanksgiving somehow. Emmett had been there, and while he was perfectly polite to both my father and Esme – a suspicious sight if I ever saw one – he kept waggling his eyebrows at me when they weren't looking, making kissy faces whenever they shared a moment. It was sickening. After that I saw a lot more of Esme, and I'm sure Rosalie was seeing a lot more of Carlisle. There was one awkward morning when I had found Esme in our kitchen in Carlisle's shirt and nothing else. For better or for worse, it was getting serious very quickly.

So Rosalie and I set out to get along. We scoured through our interests, searching in a near-panic for some shared passion, and came up with one: Jet Li movies. When we stumbled upon this mutual pleasure, it launched us immediately into an in-depth comparison between his original Chinese classics and the later Hollywood stuff, with us swinging back and forth between defending one or the other as the height of his career. By the end of the process, we found ourselves carrying on these discussions in the cafeteria while Emmett looked on in shock and Bella's eyes glazed over.

Jasper was tensely polite to me, and I suspected Alice had something to do with it. We never fell back into the easy friendship I predicted when we'd first met, but we weren't snarling at each other all the time either. The stalemate seemed indefinite, and I accepted it while it lasted because I liked the peace, however awkward it was.

The truth was, I liked them all. They were funny, they were inebriated, they were loud and crude and fucking good times all around.

But while the daze of smoking-drinking-school-Bella was mostly a blur, there were highlights. During our interludes between her house and school she pelted me with oldies, insisting that if I was going to boast any musical expertise I had to 'know my roots'. When she started in on Fats Domino and Tom Waits, I pleaded with her to educate me with some slightly more modern 'roots' and then maybe we could work backwards. She slid into the nineties with equal parts reluctance and eagerness. When I teased her about it, she insisted it was an exciting era, but that I was missing out on the full experience by doing this 'ass-backwards'. Her word choice delighted me.

The night we went to Seattle, there were a series of moments, though a number of them had been spent with Alice.

At the club, Bella had danced like she was all alone, her eyes closed to the world as she seemed to move to a rhythm she alone heard. She wasn't very good at it, I noted with a small smile, cradling my drink to my chest as I watched her from a distance. Alice and Jasper were dancing together, and Rosalie and Emmett looked like they were engaging in some sort of mating ritual, but she danced alone. It made me sad, but I knew I couldn't dance with her.

When Alice came panting back to the table, I watched with dread as Bella took her place alongside Jasper and they danced together.

"You gonna tell her you love her?"

I turned to look at Alice in shock. She was still panting, and her eyes were shining brightly, but her expression was serious. "Excuse me?"

She rolled her eyes at my attempt at nonchalance. "Bella. You love her. I can tell."

I frowned at her, and wondered if maybe I was being a little petulant.

"There are some things I see that maybe other people don't see. They don't pay attention. But I think she likes you, too."

I rolled my eyes at her. Clearly she had no idea what she was talking about.

"Listen," she suddenly leaned in and I did the same automatically. I had the impression she was about to impart some very important words to me. "I know she's brash and insensitive, and she'll never be accused of being the most reasonable person in the world, but you and I know that Bella's a good person. She deserves to be happy. She's always been so nice to me, even though…"

She trailed off then, looking at Jasper on the dance floor, his hands now on Bella's hips, guiding her dance. His eyes saw only her. When I turned back to look at Alice again, her expression seemed… resigned. I didn't want to see her so sad. "Bella and Jasper were close once, weren't they?" She looked at me warily. "But you two belong together. Just because they were close before…"

Alice looked at me with a strange smile. "Once, twice, seven or eight times. That kind of closeness doesn't really go away, you know? I guess you can see they're still pretty close. Almost like they're…" She didn't finish the thought, but I heard the unspoken words anyway. _Almost like they're perfect for each other. _She bit her lip, then smiled at me. "He might not like you putting the moves on Bella, but you know that shouldn't matter. If you like her, you should try. If you don't, you'll never know." Her eyes turned back to the pair on the dance floor. "You two could be really, really good together. I can tell."

I looked, too, and I imagined myself in Jasper's place, _my_ hands on her hips, _my_ breath against her ear. How much did I want it? My heart picked up pace at the thought. I wanted to dance with her. I wanted to touch her that way, and have her let me.

And she didn't like me, did she? So why then did she want me to take her to and from school every day when Jasper would clearly be prepared to do it instead?

I looked at Alice again, and she was smiling knowingly at me. Like she could read my thoughts, or see my future, and know where I was headed even before I did. Maybe she did. Maybe little Alice the chatterbox really did see things no one else saw.

Another favored moment had come later that night, as I had dropped Bella off at home. She was asleep. Her face looked perfectly peaceful as she breathed regularly, in and out, her hair in her face. It was almost four in the morning, and the lights in her house were all out. "Bella?" I touched her face almost reverently. It was such a pity to have to wake her. "Bella, we're here."

Her eyes opened slowly, and she blinked. "Edward?"

I loved the way she said my name. I smiled at her and brushed her hair out of her eyes. "We're here."

She looked out the window and rubbed her eyes sleepily. "Oh." So fucking cute.

"Will you be able to get upstairs all right?"

She smiled tiredly at me, nodding. "I'll be fine. Thanks for the ride."

"No problem." She got out of the car, walking slowly to the door, still rubbing her eyes. I waited for her to get inside, then waited a little longer. After a minute, a light came on in an upstairs window, and I stared at it hungrily. That was her room. She was up there. I was fighting the urge to climb up the nearby tree and slip inside, to go there and be near her some more, to see her room and her bed and touch her when she came to the window. Her silhouette was ethereal, her little hands up against the glass, holding her curtain aside. She seemed to be looking at me, but I couldn't tell from so far away. She lifted one of her hands up in a wave, and I smiled again. Wondering if she could really see me, I waved back, then forced myself to drive away.

The whole way home, the picture of her standing at that window was burned into my mind.

However, my absolute favorite moment came during the Halloween camping trip. We had crashed Mike Newton's party briefly, stumbling drunk and looking for mayhem. Once Emmet and Rosalie had desecrated Mr. and Mrs. Newton's bedroom with their consummating, and Jasper and Alice had played shotgun with a flimsy home-made bong on the living room couch, Bella had signaled it was time to go by tossing Mike's sound system into the pool, assuring the party she was doing them all a favor because listening to Avril Lavigne was clinically proven to kill your brain cells and she knew they all couldn't afford losing any. The six of us had piled into Emmett's Jeep and driven to a clearing where we had proceeded to enjoy a bonfire, some marshmallows, two hash pipes and too much cheap booze. We told scary stories. It was surprisingly mild and mellow for them, to be honest. I discovered that Alice was afraid of birds, and Bella was afraid of robots. Emmett feared flying insects in all forms, and lathered his face and hands in bug repellant. Rosalie and I sniggered at him behind his back, and Jasper rolled his eyes repeatedly.

After we had all bunkered down, Emmett snoring loud enough to scare away bears and Alice intermittently squeaking in her sleep, I saw her suddenly rise and walk away. The black shape wasn't the leggy tall of Rosalie or the tiny of Alice, but the perfect in-between of Bella, and my heart had pounded at the sight of her, even if it was just a blurry dark shape. I slipped out of my sleeping bag and followed her, finding her struggling a little to climb the hood of the Jeep. Wordlessly, I took her hips to hoist her up, and she gasped, turning to look over her shoulder at me with wide eyes. "You're awake."

It wasn't a question. I smiled as I helped her settle on the hood, and climbed up beside her just as she was lying back, her hair a glorious mess beneath her head.

"Isn't it beautiful out here?"

Tearing my eyes away from her, I looked at the sky, lying back as well. There were so many more stars out here than there had been in Chicago, even with the clouds obscuring them. The moon looked closer somehow, heavy and elliptical over us, so close you could see all the imperfections that made it look like it was made out of cheese. I turned to look at her, and she was flushed, her eyes soft, reflecting the muted glow of the moonlight and nothing else, and she was a goddess in jeans and a hoodie. Sure, it was nice, but I wouldn't call it beautiful. Not with her there.

When I didn't answer she turned to look at me, and she seemed to immediately notice the intensity in my eyes. She blinked once, twice, and I wondered if she would say something. If she would bite her lip and blush. If she would grab my hair and kiss me. If she would laugh at me. "You're not looking," she whispered.

"I'm looking," I countered. And I was.

She sighed, turning her gaze back to the sky. "Of all the doors in all the joints in the city…" She smiled as she trailed off, placing one hand behind her head while the other rested on her abdomen. I stared at her profile, and I knew she was aware of it, but she just smiled and let me. We stayed that way until the sky turned pink before sliding off the Jeep – again I held her hips and helped her – and returned to our sleeping bags.

I wanted her. I absolutely wanted her. But Alice's words had taken on new meaning since she'd spoken them in Seattle. I knew I wanted her because she was gorgeous. But I also knew she made my heart stutter. Either way, there was no escaping the fact that I did want her. And if Alice was right about that, which, who was I kidding, she so was, then was she right about the other thing she'd said? That Bella wanted me? That we would be good together?

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw her again in the window with her hand lifted in a wave, or smiling to herself as I stared hungrily at the contours of her face in the dark. Did she hate me anymore?

Sometimes I allowed myself to imagine that she wanted me, too. That she thought of me all the time. That I made _her_heart stutter. I allowed myself to imagine, and it was such an extraordinarily fantastic world I imagined that it got harder and harder to stop once I started picturing it. At first it had been enough to imagine her thinking of me or wanting to be with me. But as time went on I pictured her talking to me about it. Holding my hand. Kissing me. I imagined an entire relationship, fabricated every moment of a courtship that as far as I knew would never be. Over the course of a few weeks, I lost myself in a world where not only was it possible, it was inevitable.

But there was reality.

Aside from those precious moments I spent in her company, little figments of time that I was sure meant more to me than they did to her, I was aware of how ridiculous my fantasizing was getting. And my dreams.

Almost every night she asked me if I loved her, and as I woke up feeling more and more frustrated, I wondered why I never answered her. I thought whatever answer I gave her in the dream, it would be as much news to me as it would be to her. Because I was so far gone, I didn't even know how to classify how I felt about her anymore. I didn't know how to put it in words.

***

"Edward, you going back to Chicago for the holidays?"

I shrugged at Rosalie, passing Bella's pipe back to her. We were in the woods behind the parking lot, killing time before the first bell rang, and I enjoyed this part of the ritual. "I doubt it. We don't really have much family there, besides Grampy Edward. But he's kind of an agoraphobic misanthropic nutjob, so we're not welcome to visit him. You know, ever."

Bella giggled. "A window into your future, perhaps?"

I pouted at her, and she giggled harder.

"When are you and Esme heading for New York?"

"Soon's school lets out. Esme wants to beat the rush, which is of course impossible, but I won't argue against a few extra days of city shopping." Rosalie smirked and flipped her hair. "Of course, it was Sophie's choice for her, big shopping versus Dr. Hottie, but not even your dad can beat Louis Vuitton."

Bella rolled her eyes. "Remind me again why people find your superficiality shocking, Rose."

Rosalie made a face, and I chuckled and shook my head. "Where are you going for Christmas?" I poked Bella in the shoulder, getting her to turn and face me again.

She shrugged. "Renee wants me to go down to Jacksonville, but I don't wanna leave Charlie alone."

Rosalie snorted. "Charlie won't be alone. I thought he was going to La Push. It's only what he's done _every single year._"

"La Push?"

Bella gave Rosalie a quick glance. "Yeah, we usually spend our holidays down at the res with Billy Black and his kids."

Billy Black. Meaning his kid was… "Jacob Black."

Again, she and Rosalie exchanged glances. "Yeah, Jake and his sisters."

I sighed, getting up and dusting off my pants. "I'll see you guys later," I mumbled, making my careful way back to the school. I was agitated. I was so agitated. She'd spend her Christmas with that overfed hat rack. And I'd be suffering through Carlisle's usual guilty silence at dinner. Fucking wonderful.

"Edward, wait!" I stopped in my tracks, though I really wanted to keep going. But I couldn't say no to her. I hated that sometimes.

"What is it, Bella?" I tried to keep my voice neutral, but it sounded forced even to my own ears.

She winced as though she heard it, too. "You're upset." I sighed and she blushed, dropping her gaze to her shoes. "What're you doing for Christmas?"

I shrugged. "Just me and Carlisle and a microwaved feast." What did she care really? I'd been spending so much time with her in my fantasy world that I was forgetting that she didn't. That it was me who was crazy for her, and that she was just being a friend at most.

"You wanna skip school today?" Her voice was so earnest that I looked up. "Let's do something! We'll go somewhere awesome!" She was animated now, reaching out and taking my hand to lead me back to the parking lot. I followed her silently, not willing to protest, not knowing why. "I have to show you something. You're gonna love it, I know!"

We reached my car just as the bell rang, and Jasper, Alice and Emmett turned to look at us. To watch us go to my car. Rosalie came out of the woods behind us, and I looked over my shoulder to shrug at her. She shrugged back. With Bella, who knew?

She played Weezer in the car, directed me every once in a while, and rattled her little tin box impatiently now and again. She sang the Sweater Song. It made me smile, and she smiled back.

"You're a horrible singer," I lied through my fucking teeth, but this was how I teased her.

She rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at me, and I chuckled. Yeah, I felt better. She was cheering me up the way only Bella could. The way only Bella would. We were out of the town limits and driving south. She gave me more directions and we headed up a ridge, and eventually there was nothing but greenery outside the left window and nothing but the Pacific Ocean down a sheer cliff face to the right, no sign of human life whatsoever.

"Here, stop here," she finally breathed excitedly, and I braked immediately and cut the engine. She turned to face me, her eyes sparkling. "You're gonna want to have a smoke before this."

I blinked. Before this? Before what? I watched her prepare her little pipe, then pass it almost reverently to me. I brushed her fingers as I took it, making sure to display the right amount of care while handling it. She loved that damn pipe. Present from Jasper, Alice had mentioned once. I hated the thing.

Placing my lip on the mouthpiece, I was suddenly very aware that Bella had placed her lips here just this morning. We'd shared before, but never just the two of us. I imagined I could taste her there. I inhaled deeply, trying to capture not just the smoke, but her lips in that breath. I held it in and toked again. More of Bella's lips. I took a third one and passed the pipe back to her with my eyes closed. When the urge to cough was too much, I released the smoke, turning to look at her face and catching her in an unguarded moment. She was staring at me, her mouth slightly open. I couldn't help but smirk. "See anything you like, Swan?"

She caught herself and adjusted her expression into one of pleasant indifference, shrugging and setting the pipe up for her own smoke. Still, I saw her blush, and wondered if, insanely enough, I had been right. Has she been looking at me because she liked what she saw? Was she as attracted to me as I was to her? It couldn't be. My level of attraction towards her was of epic proportions. No way she could feel the same. As she brought her pipe to her lips, I wondered if she thought about the fact that it had just been between mine. Was she looking to breathe in my kiss the way I had been looking to breathe in hers? My inner pussy was getting pathetic.

I watched her smoke, and even in this she looked beautiful. She turned heavy lidded eyes towards me and smiled, a lazy slow smile that had my heart stuttering in my chest. Fucking gorgeous. So gorgeous it was absolutely fucking obscene. She was fantastic.

"Come on," she said hoarsely, sliding my jacket off to reveal an oversized black sweater, and fuck if I wasn't raging hard at the sight. She opened her door and got out of the car, and I did the same, watching her walk to the cliff side, puzzled, hungry, cautious. She unbuckled her jeans and my throat went dry. Jesus. Was she taking off her pants? Oh God, she was going to be pantless in front of me. I concentrated on Carlisle and Esme, on dying puppies and on Emmett in a bikini to hold back an embarrassing but powerful bout of premature ejaculation. She kicked off her sneakers, and I was right; she wasn't wearing any socks. Her jeans slid slowly down her ass, slowly revealed her thighs, and I swallowed a moan of delight. I was so fucked. She was stripping. Here? Now? What was she doing?

She looked over her shoulder then, bent over to pull her feet out of her jeans and presented the most enticing view of her ass, clad in frilly black lace. The position made a similar one pop into my mind, where naked and writhing, she would be wrapped around my cock. Emmett in a bikini. Emmett buck naked, blowing kisses at me. Emmett kissing my father._Damn. That was close…_

She smirked at me then, straightening her back again and grabbing the hem of her sweater. "See anything you like, Cullen?" I tore my eyes away from her legs – and let me tell you how hard that was because God had never created a more perfect pair of legs – and looked at her face. I was struck mute. I couldn't even formulate a sarcastic reply or pass it off as a joke. I was stoned, and I was fiercely attracted to this pantless girl in sexy black panties, and there wasn't another soul in sight for miles and miles. See anything I like? God yes. Very fucking much.

Her expression changed, and she must have seen it, the raging lust in my eyes. Did she see the yearning there, too? The longing? The insatiable desire to not just fuck her but to _make love _to her? Edward fucking Cullen, and I was fantasizing about making love to a girl I hardly knew. Christ, who'd let the inner pussy out to play?

Her eyes changed suddenly, fear, uncertainty, hesitation. She bit her lip and pulled the blouse over her head, and it caught in her hair and made it cascade down her back in waves. And then I saw it, the web of scars across her lower back and right shoulder, the disfigured scar tissue vivid and white against her alabaster skin, her right shoulder slightly lower than her left. What had happened to her? When she turned to look at me again, her face showed more uncertainty and fear, and I realized she was worried about my reaction. How would anyone react to this sight? To a visual of Bella's pain? I wiped the sweat from my brow because even with all those scars, all that pain, and even if it was freezing out there, she was the most awe-inspiring vision in the simplest most beautiful white bra cupping her perfect breasts. She dropped the blouse next to her jeans and sneakers, and I looked up at her face to see her looking at me again. There was no playfulness in the look, just a seriousness and intensity that made the air around us buzz. And her fear.

She started walking towards me, and I saw the scars wrapped around her ribs to her belly button, less severe but visible, and I watched her movements, completely captivated. I wanted to drop down to my knees and worship her. I wanted to stare at her forever. My hands were not worthy enough to touch this goddess before me. My knees trembled and somehow, I managed to remain standing as she reached me and placed her hands on my jacket, pushing it off my shoulders. I helped her remove it, then covered her hands with my own as she gripped the hem of my shirt. I took it off myself, because the thought of her undressing me was maddening, and not even a porno of my father, Emmett, grampy Edward and Chief of fucking Police Charlie Swan would have stopped me from taking her then. When my shirt came off and my chest was revealed, she licked her lips, and I groaned. Her eyes darted back to my face, then back to my chest. I let my own eyes wander and noticed her nipples were hard, straining against her bra. It was cold up here. Or she wanted me. I could find out which. All it would take would be one brush against her panties, to see if she was wet…

Stop! The porno played in my head again, but my body didn't care. I wanted her. She was mouthwateringly perfect. No amount of scars or damage or pain could change that. I wanted her. I needed her.

Her hands ghosted over my abdomen, and every muscle twitched and jumped at her touch until she reached the waistline of my jeans. "Take them off," she whispered, her voice husky and deep and so fucking sexy I could have died. With clumsy fingers, I obeyed, kicking off my shoes and sliding my jeans down my legs so I was left standing in nothing but my boxers. She appreciated the view, licking her lips again, and my fingers twitched. I reached up and brushed her hair off her shoulder – the right one, the damaged shoulder – and she shivered in response to my feathery touch. "Do you trust me, Edward?"

"Yes." My answer was fervent, and so full of conviction that I knew it to be true. She could ask me for a kidney, and I'd happily comply right now.

She smiled then, a beautiful smile that made her easily the most beautiful thing I'd ever see anywhere, and took my hand. "Then come with me."

And suddenly, without warning and without hesitation, she let go of my hand, running straight for the cliff – and jumped off.

**AN/ **

**Chapter song*:Brand New - Jesus Christ**

***I don't usually have a single song that could possibly cover an entire chapter especially not one this long, but it's just apt. I recommend you give it a listen, or at least give the lyrics a read. It's rather lovely.**


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money ****it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

Chapter 10 – "Cold and Wet"

"Bella!" I ran after her, too late, and just missed her shoulder as she leaped into the air. I was right behind her and, I realized belatedly, falling through the air as I was, that I had just jumped off a cliff. I had enough time to realize this before I sliced through the water, and I felt myself go down until all sense of direction was lost. I was suspended, lost in the icy inkiness that was all around me. Where was Bella?

The thought pulled me out of my shock, and I opened my eyes against the stinging water. It was then I suddenly felt it, something small gripping my arm just below the elbow and pulling me in a direction. I turned to see her, kicking out and pulling me with her, and I kicked in the same direction and helped her lead me. I trusted her completely. The thought made me content.

Our heads broke through the surface, we gasped for breath, and I looked at her, stunned. She wasn't facing me, she was facing the shore, and she held onto my arm as she led me back. My mind was pulsing with the frantic beating of my heart. She was amazing. She was fantastic. She was beyond anything I'd ever dreamed a girl could be. There were no words for what she was, and I wanted to show her that because I knew I couldn't tell her.

Bella Swan. Strong, snarky and completely insane.

We stumbled onto the beach, but she didn't stop as she dragged me behind her into the trees. She walked surely, still holding onto my arm, until she reached a hollow in an ancient fallen oak. She curled inside it and turned to me, beckoning me to join her. Her face was glowing with energy and vitality. Her eyes were a puppet show of excitement and play. I compressed my body into the small space beside her, and her skin was ice cold like mine. She pulled a dusty old blanket from a hole in the tree trunk and threw it over us both, snuggling into me. We were wrapped around each other, and in the tiny hollow I could feel her shiver. I could feel every goose bump and every crevice. We tried to arrange ourselves into a comfortable position, and every accidental touch of her stomach or brush against her breasts made my blood burn. We settled into a sitting position, her with her back pressed into my chest. I wrapped my arms around her and waited for our shared body warmth to bring back the feeling in my fingertips. Absently, I would rub her arms or her shoulders, and she would hold my hands and exhale on my fingers, her warm breath making my skin tingle. If my body wasn't freezing, I would have found it difficult to control myself with her pressed up so tightly against me while each of us wore nothing but our soaking wet underwear.

"Bella," I murmured after a while, my hands resting lightly on her shoulders. I could feel the scar tissue now, the irregular bumps and lines of it against my palm. I could see a small cluster of scars on her right ear, as well, where I'd never seen them before. Why had I spoken her name? What did I want to say? Wasn't it rude to ask her?

"There was an accident," she filled me in without turning her head, and her hands covered my own. "Last year, Tyler Crowley lost control of his van in the parking lot at school, and I got caught between the van and my truck." My mouth fell open. "It should have killed me instantly, but Jazz knocked me mostly out of the way. He got the brunt of it. Jasper saved my life."

I swallowed as her hand led mine over the scars on her shoulder, down to around her ribs. I could feel her pulse underneath my fingertips. I stared at the web of scars, then thought about the almost identical scars Jasper had. My mind's eye presented me with images of Bella and Jasper, trapped between two cars, blood and broken glass all over them both...

"I always thought ever since that Jasper would always be my savior. That he'd always be the one to rescue me. That I'd always need rescuing."

I wanted to tell her she didn't, that she was strong and sure and incredibly independent, and she didn't need anybody. Not Jasper, not Jacob, and certainly not me. But my mouth was dry. There wasn't enough moisture there to form the words.

"We used to date, you know. Jazz and I. For more than two years."

I felt sick. Maybe a part of me knew.

"Jasper didn't jump," she said quietly, and I looked intently at the back of her neck for some indication of what that meant. "When I brought him here with me, he didn't jump. He just drove back down to the beach and picked me up by the shore."

I blinked. On second thought, it would have been the more logical thing to do. At least she wouldn't have to spend so much time being cold and wet and miserable. At least then she would have a warm car to get into.

"He gave me a lecture on valuing my life because if I didn't care, other people did. He was so mad at me." She chuckled a little and shook her head. I was still cursing myself for not thinking of that sooner when she turned to me.

Her smile was mischievous, but her eyes were so warm, and I saw the fear and uncertainty from the cliff in them again. She was scared. She was so small and so frail against my chest. My heart pounded, and I knew she could feel it. We were so close, and her eyes were so beautiful. I lost myself in them. No surprise there. "I just wanted to share something. He was…" she swallowed and blinked rapidly, a small blush coloring her cheeks. "I'm glad you jumped." My mouth was suddenly even drier. The story of her accident, the evidence I'd seen all over her skin, her confession about Jasper's rescue, their past and his failure to jump, and her scent so thick and warm in the mossy hollow. I looked at her and realized that, regardless of what I'd thought all along, this was the first time I was seeing Bella Swan.

Bella Swan. Soft, fragile and utterly defenseless.

Not exceedingly hateful, nor confidently intimidating. She was a young girl, scared, lonely, unsure and yet vibrant, full of life and excitement, impulsive and daring and crazy fun, and exceedingly beautiful on top of all that. And when I was sad, even when – _especially _when—she was the reason I was sad, she did what she could to make it better. A little bit. Not very good at it, but she tried, and she was exceptionally clumsy and kind like that. It would be so easy to lean my head down ever so slightly and place my lips over hers. She would let me, I knew it for certain. Maybe even the entire day had been a kind of foreplay to this moment, because she wanted me to do it. To take control and make her feel silly for being insecure. To worship her with my body and make her forget Jasper. To lovingly kiss and lick and caress every inch of imperfect skin on her body. It would be so easy. It would be so good. It would be so wrong.

Not like this. I wanted her so bad, but not like this.

Carefully, exerting every ounce of my willpower and concentration, I brushed my lips against her cheek in a chaste kiss. I wanted her to know it wasn't a rejection. I wanted to show her I wanted her, but that I was fighting it for a greater good. For a greater _us_. I knew I had no words to say it, so I lovingly ran my hand across her scarred shoulder and she shivered. "Maybe we should start making our way back to our clothes," I mumbled, reluctance evident in my voice, and Bella looked at me in shock. Maybe she saw in my eyes the struggle. Maybe she recognized it for what it was. She nodded.

She got up, rolling the blanket back into its place, and led me a short distance away onto a small dirt path. I was warmer, but I was still shivering. She seemed fine, but Bella Swan always seemed fine. I missed the hollow of the tree, and we were silent as we walked. Finally, she stopped at an old bush, and started pulling the shrubbery away to reveal a well-concealed red motorcycle. I had seen it once before, and I was not pleased to see it again. I eyed it warily. She slid onto it and kick started it to life, looking at me expectantly. "Come on."

"I don't know," I hesitated. Riding on a bike was supposed to be unpleasant at best. Riding one barefoot and in my underwear seemed entirely insane. Even if I was freezing my nuts off. Even if cliff-diving in December was possibly the stupidest fucking thing Bella could have done.

She rolled her eyes. "He'll jump off a cliff, sure, but ride a motorcycle? Fuck no!"

I growled and she laughed at my frustration, revving the engine and waggling her eyebrows. "You could wait here, and I'll go get the Volvo."

My eyes widened in horror. No one drove the Volvo but me. No one. Grumbling loudly, I got on behind her – my male ego took a blow right then and there – and locked my arms around her waist. She tightened my grip and put on her helmet, and I was so pressed up against her it wasn't even funny.

When she took off I shut my eyes, waiting for the inevitable crash. After a while, when nothing came but the slow tilting from side to side as she turned, and only the wind blowing against my face told me I was moving at all, I opened my eyes hesitantly.

The wind burned them, and I had to blink rapidly, but I couldn't close my eyes after I got a glimpse. The world moving past us was an intense green, the air rushing towards us frosty and thick so that it felt like we were slicing through it. I started to note how her muscles tensed one way or another as we turned, and I had to remind myself that I was sitting here behind Bella Swan, the most incredible, exciting girl I'd ever met. I never would've thought in September I'd ever be here, on the back of a motorcycle right after cliff diving. With her.

She pulled up beside my Volvo and killed her engine, taking off the helmet and turning to me with another bright and vibrant smile. "How about that? You didn't fall off."

I rolled my eyes in an attempt to be nonchalant, but quickly got off the bike. It felt like the insides of my thighs were burning up. Rubbing my arms to get the blood circulating in them – it was fucking freezing! – I picked up my jeans, sweater and jacket, and dove into the car. I started it and cranked the heat just as she was getting into the backseat, her clothes gathered in her arms.

"I won't look if you don't," she promised, and I swallowed and nodded, avoiding glancing at the rearview mirror. I told myself not to think about what was going on in my backseat, and more importantly, not to picture it. Too late.

Hurriedly, I pulled off my wet boxers, kicking them under my seat as I pulled on my freezing but dry jeans. I winced. Commando in jeans. Not my favourite feeling. I cleared my throat as I pulled my sweater on over my head, and she kicked my seat.

"I'm done," she announced, and I turned around to see her lying across the seats on her back, her jeans on and her arms crossed over her bare breasts. I felt the blood rush out of my head, and felt the breath escape my lungs before whipping my head around back to the front so fast my neck popped. She giggled, delighted by my reaction apparently. "Made ya look."

I was glaring furiously out the windshield, my heart racing as I cursed her silently. That was a good one. I was pulling my jacket on as she opened her door and stepped out. "I'm gonna take the bike back to the beach. Follow me as close as you can get, okay?"

The warmth was getting my brain to kick start, and I followed her in awe as my mind went through the events of the past few hours again. I couldn't understand her anymore today than I did back in September. I was an idiot, and a pathetic one at that, and I kept coming back for more. And then she gives me a window, and I act like a fucking gentleman. And yet, I realized as she disappeared down a dirt path too narrow for me to follow, forcing me to stop and let the car idle, slowly the magic of that hollow was fading, and it seemed more and more like a dream or another figment of my imagination. By the time she came jogging back through the bushes and stumbled, catching herself on the hood of my car and giggling to herself, I had convinced myself it hadn't been real. She slid into the front seat still giggling at her near-fall experience. "You wanna get something to eat?" she asked, beaming at me, and my mood lightened in spite of myself.

"Sure. Where would you like to go?" I offered a small smile, and she considered for a moment as she put her wet hair up into a messy bun. Fucking sexy.

"Feel like driving to Port Angeles? They have an Italian place there that's not so bad." I nodded, backing my car out of the path and turning onto the road.

She gave me directions and I followed them with a lingering sense of awe. It was just weeks ago since Bella and I had started our strange but hopefully enduring ritual of morning pick ups and afternoon drop offs. Weeks since the smell of her filled my car and made me light-headed. Weeks since she'd given up on being full-time bitch to me and become something else. Weeks since my outraged dislike of her warped into the realization that I was falling hard and fast for her.

That's Edward fucking Cullen for you. Nothing half-assed.

Suddenly, the car was filled with the crooning of Robert Smith, and I jumped as Bella sighed. She took her phone out of her pocket and bit her lip, then texted someone before switching her phone off and putting it back in her pocket. I looked at her questioningly. "It's Jazz." She shrugged, and I made a noncommittal sound. Of course. He wanted to know where she was.

We picked our way through lunch, a strange buzz of energy making my skin tingle with the sensation of her. Every time she moved, every time she adjusted, my body realigned to face her and accommodate her new position. When she breathed I heard it, and when she shifted her feet I felt it. The cells in my body were like satellites, tuned to her siren frequency. I even noticed the slight bump-bump-bump of her pulse in her jugular, and fantasized about feeling it against my tongue. We spoke very little, and I was intensely aware of every movement of her mouth. When she spoke, when she smiled, even when she ate. The way her lips would open for a bite, and then slide across the fork, the subtle circular motion of her chewing. I was hypnotized, and kicking myself for not kissing her in the hollow when I had the chance.

As I led her back to the car, I could feel her shoulder against my arm. The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end, a strange electric buzz of euphoria racing through my veins. It would be so easy to touch her. To put my arm around her. I could make it casual. Maybe she would let me.

But the walk to the car was too short, and we were there without any major events touch-wise. She sang during the drive back to her house, her voice thick with an intensity that put Marianne Faithful to shame. I never liked Marianne Faithful very much, but then again I'd never heard her sung by Bella.

There was no going back.

She had captured me completely.

"Thanks for today," she murmured, almost a whisper I didn't hear, and I realized with dismay we were at her house. No cruiser outside. Just the giant red truck.

"Thanks for taking me cliff-diving." Lame. That was the best I could come up with? _Come on, Cullen._

"No problem." She looked at her hands in her lap, her fingers tangling and untangling together, a jerky dance of nerves and insecurity. Instinctively, I reached out and covered her hands with one of my own. She blushed.

"Bella," my voice cracked, and I swallowed to try again. "I've been meaning to tell you-"

But I never finished the sentence, and the thought was launched out of my head by the sudden presence of Bella everywhere. Her arms were around my neck, and I had hands full of oranges and flowers, tinted with ocean salt and pure heaven. I inhaled her, gripping her to me so hard I knew it was probably uncomfortable for her. But I couldn't stop.

"Do you love me, Edward?"

I froze. Was this real?

She pulled back slightly and looked up at me with those eyes, and I couldn't even breathe. "Do you love me?"

I opened my mouth. I closed it again. I swallowed. I struggled for breath.

Her eyes grew panicked, then mortified, then sad. And I closed my eyes in shame, because I made her feel that way.

The featherlight touch of velvet against my lips was so soft, I almost didn't feel it. Almost. My eyes flew open and she was there, her lips on mine, her eyes heavy-lidded and still so sad. I was too shocked to react, and the heavy scent of citrus muddled my brain. I couldn't even close my eyes. I couldn't kiss her back. She watched me with those eyes, through her lashes, pressing her lips to mine more firmly, and the added fervor jolted me back to life.

I moved my lips against hers, placing one of my hands on her cheek to keep her close. I felt as much as heard her inhale sharply at my sudden reciprocation, and with a startled whimper she was suddenly gone. I opened eyes I didn't remember closing to see her already fumbling with the door. She was out of the car before I could open my mouth to call her name or ask what I'd done wrong.

And as her front door slammed shut, I stood outside my car, my hands in my hair, my mind frantic with disbelief. Why now? What happened this time? Why did she kiss me if she was just going to run as soon as I started kissing her back? Why why why? Where did I even start with all the whys of Bella Swan?


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money ****it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

**This and the version on Tw'd are caught up now, so I'll upload the next chapter here as soon as it gets validated there. Thanks for those of you that have switched over and come out to review, and thanks to the new readers who have said nothing but awesome about this story. You guys are truly delectable.**

Chapter 11 – "Christmas"

Whatever we had shared, it was over. Like it was never there at all. She took all of our possibilities with her when she got out of my car and never came to the window to wave good-bye.

I drove in circles for hours, stopped at the gas station and drove around some more. I was frantic. Something had gone wrong. Something horrible had changed everything so that I was back to where I started from. Back to square one, with Bella glaring at me, furious with me. Hating me. Loathing me. Me, helpless to change it. I was under no delusions that it was something I'd done that had changed Bella's attitude towards me. I knew it was all her. So what had changed? She had kissed me. But disaster hadn't struck until I had kissed her back. So was that my mistake? But then why had she kissed me? Was it completely over? Was there nothing I could do to salvage that strange but wonderful brand of kindness that was uniquely Bella? I admit, I became obsessed.

And with that realization, I raced back to her house. I needed to tell her… something. That she meant something more to me than a potential fuck or a round of coital good times. That I needed her. That I wanted her. That she had possessed my mind and my soul.

The cruiser was outside, and I hesitated because her truck was not. Taking a deep breath, I marched to the door and knocked. I told myself I was being brave. This was the right thing to do. I needed to talk to her.

Her father answered, his eyebrows raised. "Edward, what can I do for you son?"

I swallowed. "Is Bella here, Sir?"

He smiled. "'Fraid not. She went down to see Jacob. You can call her if you need to, she tends to forget herself."

My face must have been a Hindenberg of dismay, because his expression faltered.

"I'm sure she'll come back right away if it's important." _She'll never come back._

"Thank you, Sir." I barely managed to sound civil, and I wasn't even sure I managed that much. I walked back to the car in a stupor, and the whole manic drive home I was hoping I'd get into an accident.

She was with Jacob. She had run to him. She didn't want me.

And then, the ultimate act of cowardice, I didn't go to school the next day. I lay in bed, replaying my favorite moments spent in her company, and silently and mournfully bidding them good-bye. The night under the stars. Seattle. All those mornings we talked about music. The shivering time spent in the hollow of that tree. That one I cherished most.

That night in my dreams she looked up at me, her eyes wide and beautiful and asked, "Do you love me, Edward?"

"Yes." It was a fervent oath, a solemn vow. I loved her.

She smiled sadly, brushed her fingers against my cheek and walked away. Away down the tunnel, towards the sound of the revving bike engine and the shadowed man waiting for her.

When I wouldn't go to school the next day, Carlisle asked if I was sick. I told him I just wanted to start the holidays early. So I missed school for the rest of the week.

Alice called. Emmett called. Rosalie called. By the third day, even Jasper called. But Bella didn't.

***

I stared at the ceiling, ignoring as best as I could the music filling the house from the west wing. I knew Carlisle would be listening to it all night. He'd pass out drunk on the floor with the record still playing. He always thought of Mom on the holidays, and Christmas this time was going to be particularly hard on him. I knew he felt guilty for hitting it off with Esme. I knew he would want to wallow in her memory. But I was too busy wallowing in my own thoughts. The loss of Bella had struck me hard, harder than it should have. I should have cared less. I should have shrugged it off. I should have been out somewhere being young and insubordinate. But all I could do was the same thing I'd done all week. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, terrified of the reality, the all too painful reality, that Bella still hated me.

It had been agonizing before, the first days I spent in Forks. But now it was torture. I loved her. There was no doubt of that left in my mind. I was hopelessly enamored, completely captivated and ridiculously devoted. That the first girl I'd ever felt that way about could hate me, the kind of intense non-malicious hatred she so clearly was capable of, literally broke my heart.

Edward fucking Cullen, bedridden of a broken heart. I was truly pathetic, but too miserable to care.

All I could think about was that whatever reprieve she'd granted me these past few weeks was over. And she had just spent Christmas with Jacob Black, and maybe she was still at his house doing God only knows what and who was I kidding? I knew exactly what they were doing. The sight of her with him was forever branded into my memories. It was all too easy to fill in the blanks. To know what would have followed naturally. If it had been me instead of him with her, I knew how it would have ended. Only it wasn't me. It was him. Or some other guy. But never me.

Dizzy and mentally exhausted, I was dozing when I heard the steady tapping against my window. I tried covering my head with my pillow, annoyed already, but the sound persisted, and suddenly there was a loud smack against the glass. I looked up, alarmed, and nearly swallowed my tongue.

Then I nearly broke my neck as I launched myself out of the bed and, tangled in my sheets, stumbled and nearly fell against the window in my haste to open it. I flung it wide and gripped her arms, and she gripped mine back as I pulled her into my room. She was freezing. "You're freezing." Oh Jesus, had I just said that out loud? The girl I'm madly and pathetically in love with comes into my room through the window after the most disastrous yet wonderful kiss of my life, followed by over a week of no contact at all, and the first thing I say to her is _that_? "Bella-"

But that was all I got out, because suddenly her arms were around my neck, and her lips were on mine and my God, she tasted like oranges and peaches and something magic and she was so soft in my arms as I wrapped them around her waist, pulling her up to me, pressing her flush against my chest and wondering if this was a dream. Did I even care? Every night I dreamt of her, asking me if I loved her, and I did, so much. But every night she walked away and left me alone. If this was a dream it was the best damn dream of my life. I would pay for it later, but right now I just wanted more of this. I ran my tongue across her lips and they parted readily for me, and the inside of her mouth tasted just as perfect as her lips did.

And I knew she was real, because my dreams never could have conjured up this perfection.

She pulled away suddenly, and I released her with a groan. With her standing two feet away from me, my thoughts battled to find their way to the forefront of my brain, but the scent and taste of Bella kept them at bay. She threw off her jacket – my jacket, the one I had given her, the one I loved her in more than I ever dared to admit out loud – and I swallowed. She was gripping the hem of her blouse now, and that too went over her head and was cast aside, and I suddenly realized, in a dull moment of panic and ecstasy and euphoria, that she was stripping, and there was no cliff here.

I couldn't connect any dots. "Bella, what are you doing here?"

The question I should have asked the moment I saw her. The question that should have taken precedence over any observation about her body temperature. She shook her head, walking towards me and throwing her arms around my waist, tucking her face against my chest and I was hit with a violent wave of her smell, her hair literally inches from my nose, her breasts pressed into me and I knew I was lost. She started kissing my chest through the thin cotton of my t-shirt, and my heart rate picked up into unhealthy speeds.

I touched her shoulders, bare and riddled with goose bumps and scar tissue, soft and perfect and still so cold, and I pulled her to me again as I devoured her mouth. The taste. I would never get enough. She gripped my t-shirt in her little fists, tugging at it in frustration, and I reluctantly released her lips long enough to help her pull it over my head while she pulled me backwards and I collapsed on top of her on my bed. Dear God, Bella was in my bed, and she looked so perfect laying there, panting in her simple white bra, her hair a tangled damp mess across my sheets. So perfect. I looked at her until she blushed, then leaned forward and kissed her softly, tenderly, pouring my heart out into the tiny movement of my lips against hers. _I love you. _I chanted it in my head because I knew I could never say it to her. _I love you I love you I love you._

With a strangled whimper she gripped the waistband of my sweatpants and tugged them down, first with her hands, then with her legs. My boxers went with them. I kicked them off and pressed myself into her, and again she whimpered. Her eyes widened when I pulled away to look at her, and I knew she felt it. How much I wanted her. What her presence here did to me. My mind railed against my body that something wasn't right. I still couldn't connect any dots. I still didn't understand. My heart was soaring though, and I knew I couldn't stop. Not if my life depended on it. Not now that she was here, and her body was mine to worship. Because I wanted to worship her. With my fingers and my lips and my tongue and everything else, I wanted to worship her.

_I love you._

She lifted her head and threw one arm around my neck, the other hand reaching down to undo the buttons on her jeans. I helped her, then tugged them down while she kicked off her shoes, panties and all so that she was in nothing but her bra. She rolled us over, and straddling me, her hot wet center pressed into my hardness, she reached behind her and unclasped the bra and there she was. Gloriously naked. Perfect in the moonlight. Gorgeous in every way. Her breasts were perfect, her nipples erect, and I wanted so badly to touch her and see if they would fit as perfectly in my hands as I imagined. I couldn't touch her, I couldn't even open my mouth to protest when she reached down and gripped me in her little hand, still freezing. Her touch sent a jolt through my body, and I bit my lip to keep from exploding then and there. She lifted herself, and I felt the tip of my cock come into contact with her. There. So warm and already wet. Ready for me. Oh God, Bella was wet and naked on top of me. When she started to inch down, swallowing me with her pulsing heat, I groaned and bit my lip again. God. So fucking tight. She breathed a moan, soft and content and I knew she felt it, too. Complete. Perfect. Fucking perfect.

I gripped her waist as she started to move, begging her with my eyes to please wait, give me a moment. Because it was all too much, the sensation of her, the ethereal vision that she was in the dark, the impossible fact that it was _her,_ it was_Bella_, and I wanted to soak in the moment. But her body adjusting to me, her walls clenching and unclenching in all the right places was torturous. Growling, I flipped us over, and she let out a small squeak of surprise. Resting my weight on my elbows, I pulled back slowly, looking into her eyes. She panted, watching me. Her big brown eyes were full of lust, of want, fear and sadness. I wanted to kiss it all away. So I did. As I thrust back into her, I took her lips in mine, cradling her head with one hand so I could tilt it at the right angle, so I could taste every corner and crevice of her heavenly mouth. She moaned. I moaned. I moved again.

Her hands gripped my waist, travelled up my back and explored my chest, leaving a trail of burning flesh in their wake though her fingers were still cold. I kissed down her jaw, showered her neck with love and attention, and rested my head in the crook of her shoulder. It was getting harder to breathe. My world contracted, shrunk and became the hot wet center where we were connected. My eyes blurred, then I was seeing nothing at all, and she moaned and lifted her hips to meet my every thrust. I lowered my head and kissed her chest, found her breasts and kissed her nipples, took her flesh into my mouth and tightened my grip on her. I wanted to absorb her into myself. I wanted to melt into her and become a part of her. Her. Bella. In my arms. Bella in my bed. Bella, Bella, Bella. "Bella, Bella, Bella…"

I don't know when my mental anthem became vocal, but I realized suddenly that it was. I could hear myself repeating her name like a prayer, and I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't fight the words back. I gripped her tighter and she moaned again, and as her arms clenched around me and her legs began to shake, I knew she was close. I wanted nothing in my life more than I wanted her to come for me then. But as her walls tightened, as her muscles fluttered around me, I knew my own release wasn't far off. Somewhere I found enough brain cells to move my hand down to her clit, and I brushed my fingers over it once, twice…

She cried out, a sudden hoarse sound that echoed in my room and filled my head, a sound I would never in my entire life forget. I felt her clamp down on my length, felt her grip me with a force that wouldn't be ignored and pushing into her one last time, I groaned into her shoulder, biting the soft scarred flesh there and pushing myself as far into her as I could, deep, deep into the wonderland that was _her_. _Bella_. "Bella…"

I was spent, and so was she, and I didn't want to pull out. I wanted to stay inside her forever. My entire body shook with exertion, my head was clouded and fogged, and I never wanted to leave the warm embrace of her arms. I could smell her, and I inhaled deeply. Citrusy. Flowery. Sweaty. Bella. My Bella.

_Mine_.

The clouds disappeared. The fog dissipated. I blinked and my vision returned as well. Slowly, carefully, I lifted my head and looked at her face. An angel. The flush of her skin was visible even in the moonlight, unlike anything I'd ever seen. Her head was thrown back, her chest rising and falling with the effort of easing her breath, and her eyes were closed. Reluctantly, I pulled out of her, and she bit her lip and turned her head to the side. Her eyes remained closed.

"Bella?" My body finally silenced, my mind raged. What had happened? Why had she come? What did it mean?

She shook her head, her eyes shut tight, rolling over onto her side and curling up into a small ball. My heart ached. She was unhappy. I wanted to kiss it away. I showered her shoulder and neck with kisses, I nipped and touched every inch of skin I could reach. She didn't speak a word.

Eventually I lay down behind her, folding her into my arms, holding her to my chest, playing with the hair that fell onto my shoulder. I couldn't see her face like this, but I told myself I'd do whatever it took to make her smile again. To make the sadness and fear in her eyes go away. Her breathing slowed down, and I knew she was sleeping when she began to mumble incoherently. I smiled to myself. She talked in her sleep, and I never thought I'd find that adorable but I did. God, I did. She was so perfect this one little thing just made her more so. As the sky brightened, I began to notice strange shapes of discoloration on her hips and arms. I brushed her hair off her shoulders and found more of them. Bruises. And there on her neck, angry red spots. Fuck. What the fuck happened? I gripped her more tightly in my arms, kissed her shoulder or the top of her head. I inhaled her. I linked my fingers with hers. When she woke up we'd have to talk about it, and she'd have to tell me why she was hurt. And then I would take care of it. I would take care of her, because she was worth it. So perfect. _I love you._

Leaning forward, I found the shell of her ear. "I love you," I whispered, and she shifted in her sleep. There would be time to talk in the morning. For now, I wanted to watch her sleep. I could have watched her sleep forever if eventually I hadn't been too exhausted to keep my eyes open.

I wish I had stayed awake.

Because in the morning, she was gone.

**AN/ **

**We're about 4-5 chapters from the end now. Hang in there, children...**


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

**More answers, incoming this chapter.**

**As per usual, thanks to the awesome readership both here and on Twi'd.**

**Be sure to stop and read the AN at the end!**

Chapter 12 – "The Morning"

I woke up slowly, my eyes heavy and my muscles sore. Good sore. Realizing why they felt that way I smiled lazily to myself. As my brain woke up I realized the lack of warmth in my arms. Where was Bella? I opened heavy eyes and blinked. The bed was empty.

I shot up into a sitting position and gripped my head. Headrush. Horror. Panic. "Bella?"

I stumbled out of the bed, tripping again in the sheets and checked the bathroom. It was empty. I stood in the doorway and looked at my room. Her clothes were gone. The window was slightly open. The room was freezing.

"Bella?"

The silence that answered me was deafening. Grabbing the first thing I could find from my closet, I got dressed and raced down the stairs. Edith Piaf still sang from the west wing. The kitchen was empty. The living room and the library and the rec room and all of it, empty and hollow and mocking. I ran back up to my room, picked up my keys and my phone and raced back to the garage. I would go to her house.

As I started the car I dialed her number. Out of service. I swore and dialed again—out of service, out of service, out of service—until I reached her house, and her truck was gone. But the cruiser was parked outside. Rashness became bravery, and I was banging on the front door before I even realized. Chief Swan answered, looking pained and confused. He looked at me with some surprise. "Edward. What can I do for you?"

"I'm sorry to bother you Chief Swan, but is Bella here?" She wasn't; I already knew she wasn't.

Even before Chief Swan's face broke into an anguished expression and he dropped his gaze to his feet. He shook his head, and met my eyes again, and they were brown like Bella's. Sad. Angry. Afraid. "No, she's not here. Sorry, son."

I swallowed. "Where is she?"

His eyes flashed anger, then more sadness. "I-" He shook his head and wouldn't meet my eyes. "I don't know."

I groaned, and he looked at me with her eyes. "If you find her…" He swallowed and looked away. "If you find her, tell her to please come home."

I nodded, mute and too choked up to speak without embarrassing myself, before racing back to my car. I realized where I was going a few minutes later. La Push. She had to be there. She went there to get away from the world. She had been sad the night before, so that would be where she'd go, right? It had to be.

I stopped at a little grocery store just inside the reservation and asked for directions to the Black house. A kindly young boy drew me a map, and every second it took him had me increasingly certain I was on the cusp of a major heart attack. Somehow, through the roaring of my blood in my ears, I found the little red house and saw her truck. It had been just a week since I'd seen it outside her house. Just a week since we'd gone cliff-diving. A week since I'd lost her. I parked next to it already breathing a sigh of relief. I found her. I just had to talk to her.

I was knocking on the door before I realized what I was doing again, loudly and rudely. "Bella!" She had to talk to me. I wouldn't leave without talking to her.

Jacob Black answered the door, his face murder. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

"Where's Bella? I need to talk to her." My eyes flickered around him, trying to catch a glimpse of her.

His tall frame moved to block my sight, and I growled at him. "She's not here."

"Bullshit, that's her fucking truck."

He growled back at me. "She took her bike last night after dinner and left."

I blinked dumbly. "She left?"

His eyes narrowed. "Yeah, she left. After making a huge scene and embarrassing me. Listen, Cullen, I don't know what kind of game you set her up for, but it ends now. Since you waltzed into her life she's been nothing but lip and bad attitude, so why don't you-"

"Where did she fucking go?" I had him by the collar suddenly, even though he was taller than me, and his eyes were wide disbelieving saucers. I thought about him with his hands all over her, with his tongue on her skin, the disgusting way he looked at her like she _belonged_ to him. I thought about the bruises I'd seen on her, about how she'd come to me right after _embarrassing_ him, and I lost my mind to a murderous rage. He must have seen it in my eyes, because his expression went from shock, to anger, to fear. I snarled, pulling my fist back and he gasped.

"She didn't tell me! She said she was going to see you, but that's all she said!" I let him go with another snarl, and he cleared his throat and gulped nervously.

"Where would she go if she wasn't going to you?" I was barely back under control, though the adrenaline was making my head spin.

Jacob shrugged. "Ask one of her little friends. She probably ran off to _them._ The bastards never liked her coming over here anyway."

I pinched the bridge of my nose, shaking my head as I turned to walk back to my car. I was shocked I was walking away without physically hurting the buffoon.

"Typical Bella if you ask me," he hissed, and my eyes snapped to his face in disbelief. He was actually _smirking_. "She fucks 'em and dumps 'em. Strings them along and breaks their hearts. If she doesn't owe you it's wham, bam, thanks man." His gaze flickered over me. "Don't feel bad, dude. It's not you. She's just like that, the crazy bitch."

I'm not sure what possessed me, but the crack of cartilage and bone was the highlight of that hideous morning, and Jacob Black's cries of agony, his blood on my knuckles, were the most satisfying catalysts to his spewed bullshit. "You need to leave Bella alone. You touch her, you come near her again, you even think about her the wrong way, I'll come after you, and I'll rip every last one of your teeth out with my bare hands, you got me?"

He glared at me, the inner corners of his eyes bloodshot where the force of my punch burst arteries. But his glare was impotent, and I knew that in the meantime, I had won. Without another word I was running back to my car. Inside, I dialed Rosalie's number, running out of options. Rosalie had to know. Rosalie had to help me.

Her voice was groggy when she answered. "Rosalie, I can't find Bella." I heard the anguish in my voice and barely recognized it as my own.

"What?" She was still groggy. Didn't she realize this was important? She needed to get up!

"I can't find Bella. She's gone!"

She mumbled to herself. "Relax, Edward. She's probably staying down at La Push for a while."

"She's not! Jacob said she took her bike and left!"

"You talked to Jacob?" She was definitely awake now.

"Where is she, Rosalie?"

I heard more fidgeting and another soft curse. "If she's not at home, and she's not with Jacob, then she's gone to see Victoria. Fuck. This is bad, Edward."

My mind raced, and I pulled over to the side of the road. I was hyperventilating. I didn't know who this Victoria was, I didn't know why it was bad, but Rosalie said it was bad and I believed her. What if she was hurt? Scared? All because of me? Because instead of being rational and talking to her, I had jumped all over the chance to sleep with her. Because I was a fucking idiot.

"Edward, come pick me up in ten minutes. Make sure you have a full tank of gas, it's going to be a long drive."

I choked out an affirmative, shaking my head to clear it. Tossing my phone in the passenger seat I took deep breaths, starting my car again and telling myself to focus. I had a direction. I was going to go help Bella. I was about eight hours too late, but hopefully, that wouldn't have detrimental consequences. Hopefully, wherever she was and whatever she was doing with this Victoria, it wasn't irreversible. It wasn't too late.

***

Emmett was pulling up to the house just as I knocked on the door, and Rosalie flew out and took me by the arm. She looked like hell. I realized her morning routine of beautification was probably foregone today, and my heart moved with gratitude I couldn't speak yet. At least she wasn't wasting time. At least she cared.

"What's going on, Rose?" Emmett looked from me to Rosalie and back again, his eyes narrowing.

"Bella," Rosalie blurted, standing in front of him. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Couldn't they talk in the car? "I think she went to see Victoria."

The color drained from Emmett's face, and he looked at me again. Fuck. I was going to start hyperventilating all over again. "Come on." He took my keys, and my fingers were too numb to stop him. "I'll drive." Probably a good idea.

I nodded and went to the passenger side of my car, waiting impatiently for everyone to get in. When we started moving, Emmett glanced at me out of the corner of his eye.

Rosalie's voice was quiet but firm from the backseat. "Is there anything we should know about, Edward? Maybe a possible reason why Bella would leave like this suddenly?"

I swallowed. I hadn't even showered yet. She was all over me, her smell and her hair and her skin. It was too soon for it all to be taken from me and subjected to Rosalie and Emmett's opinions. "She came to my room last night." My voice was hoarse. "She seemed upset, but wouldn't talk about it. This morning she was just gone."

Emmett was so shocked he forgot to watch the road. Rosalie hissed from the backseat. "Fuck. It's been building up to this. We should have seen it coming."

Emmett swallowed. "Should we… tell Jasper?"

"No!" Rosalie's voice rose sharply. "You know how he gets, Em. Especially when it comes to Bella. Christ, what do you think would happen if we got there and she wasn't alone?"

"Where is she?" I hadn't realized I'd spoken until Emmett looked at me again.

"Seattle." Rosalie sighed. "If she went to see Victoria, then that's where she'll be." She was quiet for a moment, and I heard her shift in her seat. "I'm surprised you don't know this already if you've talked to Jacob."

"You talked to Jacob?" Emmett was looking at me with an almost comically awed expression on his face. I nodded, clenching my jaw and asked the next question.

"Who is this Victoria?"

"Victoria is a small time dealer and part time hooker."

I spun in my seat to look at Rosalie. Her face was serious. Flat. There was fear in her eyes.

"She recruits girls, sometimes. Juices them up for her line of work."

"Why would Bella go there?"

"Christ, Edward," Emmett snorted. "Why do you _think_ she'd go there? She's getting wasted."

No. No no no no. My mind refused to accept it. Bella was not going to some shady prostitute in Seattle to get high. No way. She wasn't like that.

"She _isn't_ like that," Rosalie's voice cracked, and I realized numbly that I'd spoken out loud and she was responding. "She isn't like that at all. She just… doesn't know what to do with herself sometimes."

My heart hammered in my chest. It started to hurt, and I placed my hand over it to keep it down. To try to make it stop. The ache. Bella. My perfect, beautiful Bella. I'd failed her. I was a fuck up of the worst sort.

"Rosie, maybe you should tell Edward the story."

I stared at her reflection in the rearview mirror, at her panicked face and distant eyes.

"A few years ago, Bella went to her mom's wedding. Shit didn't go so well and she kind of disappeared. She called me a few days later, said she needed my help. That I should bring all my money with me because she was in trouble. She was… in debt. I went over there and found out that Victoria's boss, James, had told her that if she couldn't cough up the money he'd expect a different kind of payment. This guy was just so creepy, Edward. All the money I had with me wasn't enough. Bella wouldn't call Jasper. Their relationship was already shit, and she couldn't call her dad, either. She was too embarrassed. Poor Charlie walks on eggshells around her. He's so scared she'll run off and really get herself hurt, and he doesn't know how to talk to her about anything that matters. It ended up being Jacob. He brought a huge chunk of cash with him and got us out of there. He took me home, and then Bella was gone for a few days. Later she told me he took her home with him, and they talked and came to an understanding, so she was there all week. I don't know what they did or talked about, but… She and Jasper were already dead in every other sense, and when Jasper called her a cheating whore, well it _really_ fucking ended. Even far less would have been too much for them at that point, and it worked out for the best because Alice and Jasper are perfect together. Regardless, none of us really trust Jacob Black."

Rosalie's voice cracked, and Emmett had a throbbing vein in his forehead.

She gave him directions, and I sat back and silently tried to absorb everything I'd just heard. I couldn't come to terms with it, and I was so furious with Jacob Black that I half wanted to turn the car around and punch him some more. We arrived before I knew it, my hand still covering my chest. It hurt too much. The building wasn't an elaborate affair, but there were no broken windows or shady characters on street corners, either. In fact, I wouldn't have picked it out as anything special among an entire row of buildings. The normalcy of the setting just made everything that much harder to believe. Was I really here? Was _Bella_ really here?

Emmett put his arm around Rosalie's waist, and I saw the tension in the back of his neck and his shoulders as I walked behind them. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want Rosalie to be here. All I could think about was how much I didn't want Bella to be here. I wanted her back in my bed, where I could make things better. Where I could listen to her and make her tell me why she was so sad. Why she was so scared.

We rode up the elevator in silence, and Rosalie looked over her shoulder at me and bit her lip. Emmett spoke then, surprising us both. "I know you this isn't easy or fun for you, Rose. I promised I'd never let it happen again, but... just… let's get this over with."

The strain in his voice was unmistakable. Rosalie dropped her head, but nodded. I swallowed.

We stopped on the eighth floor, and Rosalie walked quickly down the hall. She stopped outside a door that was no different than the others, and with a deep breath, Emmett knocked loudly. The sound of music, loud and blaring, was clear through the heavy wood of the door. Someone turned it down, then there was a shuffling sound and a high-pitched voice. "Yeah?"

"Victoria." Rosalie's voice was so ashamed I could hardly believe it was really her.

The sound of a chain being unlatched, then a series of locks. The woman in the door could have been a waitress, a secretary or a salesclerk. She had bright red hair that framed her face, sharp and pointy. All of her features were sharp and pointy. Her nose, her eyes, her lips. It was almost cat-like. She didn't look like a shady prostitute. She looked like anybody else, and I hated her for it. "Well well. If it isn't Little Rosie. Not so little anymore, huh?"

"I'm just here to get Bella." I'd never heard Rosalie sound so small.

Victoria snorted, leaning against the doorframe. "What makes you think Bella is here? And what makes you think she's ready to go if she is?" She smiled a feral smile at Rosalie, showing her pointy white teeth. "You know Bella. She never could afford what she came for."

I growled, unable to take it anymore, and pushed her aside. She said something, but I couldn't make it out. "Bella?" I walked into an empty living room, littered with beer bottles and take out bags. The kitchen was in similar shape, but it, too, was empty. "Bella!" I was in a hallway, opening doors and finding nothing but empty rooms when suddenly, I flung open a door, nondescript and ordinary, and found her. My heart stopped. The pain was unbearable.

She was sprawled sideways across a bed, in nothing but her panties and an oversized t-shirt that wasn't hers. It wasn't mine. Her face looked drawn, her eyes slightly open though only the bottoms of her pupils were visible. Her lips were parted, and her hair was a tangled mess in the hands of a stranger. She wasn't alone. A man sat on the bed, too, leaning against the headboard with his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. He had her head in his lap, his fingers running through her hair. His blond ponytail was messy, and he was dressed in nothing but a pair of boxers. He wore a smirk.

"I'm going to have to ask you to keep your voice down. My Bella needs her rest." He chuckled. "She's had a busy morning."

**AN/**

**Ok! These chapters got harder and harder to write, and now they're getting harder and harder to submit. Unfortunately, the story will end soon, and I don't see a sequel for it in my crystal ball.**

**But I have other projects in mind.**

**For one thing I've been thinking about doing a side-story with certain outtakes, backgrounds and alternate POVs. Things like Bella and Jasper's break up, or Alice's POV in certain chapters. This I may start working on before the end of this story.**

**For another, I have a rough idea for a new story, very different from this one, all in BellaPOV (just as a change of pace for me to write). This would come after this story was all bundled and done.**

**Truthfully I wouldn't have considered either except for the overwhelming amount of reviewers that were dismayed at the impending finale. I'm touched and beyond flattered at this point by the sentiment, but I think a good story should know where to end, and I can't drag it on further than it goes naturally - if that's even a grammatically sound sentence.**

**If readers would like to see either or both of these ideas, let me know and I'll get right on it so diligently I'll practically ensure unemployment.**

**To wrap up the epic-ness that is this AN, thanks again and wait for the epic-ness that is the next chapter!**


	13. Chapter 13

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

**I'm thinking of taking up anti-depressants. You know, to ease the misery. Maybe y'all should have some, too.**

**I hope this chapter will answer, at long last, your questions. It was honestly one of the earliest chapters that I had visualized completely when I started this chapter. I knew this was where it was going to go from the start, but that didn't make it any easier to write. I feel insecure posting it, and unsure of myself in the worst way. So I would beg all of you to go easy on me, and I promise you all a HEA. I fucking NEED my HEA.**

**I believe in happy endings is why.**

**Now that that's out of the way, thanks to all the readers, new and old. Those of you that have reviewed, you are made of awesome. On with it.**

Chapter 13 – Nightmare aka "Don't Hate Me"

"James," Victoria's voice was breathy. Coy. Cautious. "I didn't let them in here, the guy just shoved me and I-"

"Quiet."

Victoria fell silent immediately at his command. He smirked in satisfaction, his eyes still on me.

"Get your hands off her." Was that really me? My ears were ringing. My palms were slick with sweat. I wanted to wrap my hands around his throat. I want to tear him limb from limb. I looked at her again and bit back a groan. She looked dead.

He raised his eyebrows and his hand stopped playing with her hair. "She'll be out of it for the next few hours. Down in the K-hole." He chuckled again, and the sound was dark. Frightening. "She's had quite a bit this past week. Earned every gram." His hand dropped to her jaw and he caressed her face possessively. My skin was crawling. "Such a tigress."

Emmett suddenly came into view, snapping something at James. I heard nothing. I saw red. That filthy disgusting animal. Whatever Emmett said made him smirk again, then lift his hands from her in faux submission. Emmett scooped Bella into his arms, and she looked so tiny there against his chest, so frail and weak and utterly defenseless. She was a rag, her limbs dangling unresponsively like some sort of terrifying doll. He said something to me. I heard nothing. I couldn't look away from her broken sad face. Rosalie put her hand on my arm, and I looked at her, dumb and mute and deaf and fucked. She said something, too. I heard nothing.

"You're Edward, aren't you?"

I turned at the sound of my name, and James looked smug.

"She kept calling your name. _Edward, Edward, Edward. I'm so sorry. Please don't hate me._ She'll be so pleased to know you came here for her. But of course, she'll come back." He grinned wider. "I'll look forward to when she does, Edward."

Rosalie was gripping my arm, and I wanted to yank it away and attack him. But I had to focus on Bella. I had to get her home. Make sure she was safe and warm and dressed. Away from James and Victoria and this nightmare.

Rosalie wouldn't give her up to me and sit in the front seat, so we both sat in the back with her. Rosalie pulled on her jeans while I cradled her head carefully on my lap. Her eyes fluttered every once in a while. She spoke often. "Edward," she breathed, and my heart clenched. "I'm sorry. Please, I'm so sorry."

"How did this happen?" I was shocked at the stunned quality of my voice. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the heart-wrenching expression on Bella's face.

"That bastard Phil," Rosalie's voice broke, and I swallowed. She was crying. "He hurt her, and that bitch of a mother of hers did _nothing_. She was in pieces, Edward! Renee told her it was her fault! She called her a dirty little hussy that ruined everything she touched, and Bella _believed_ her. James found her wandering around SeaTac, and she was so ripe for the taking. She keeps going back to him, and I don't know how to stop her."

Emmett groaned as Rosalie began to sob, and I clenched my jaw tight. I wanted to kill that mother of hers. I wanted to kill the fucking stepfather, too.

At that moment, Bella opened her eyes. She looked at me, then turned her head away and began to cry, too.

***

We took her back to Rosalie's. Esme eyed us warily as I carried Bella through the living room. "I'll call Charlie, tell him she's here. Does she need an ambulance?"

"No, Mom. Just some sleep." Esme nodded as Emmett put his arms around Rosalie and they went up the stairs ahead of me, leading me to Rosalie's room. I'd never been in it before, but I was too preoccupied by the precious bundle in my arms to notice any of it. I placed her carefully on the bed, and she gave a shuddering sigh that trailed into a pathetic whimper.

"What did she take?" I asked hoarsely. Rosalie was touching Bella's face and prying her eyes open. She looked like she'd done this before. Often. Emmett looked so miserable standing in his corner that had my heart had room for anything besides Bella at that moment it would've gone out to him.

Rosalie sighed, opening a drawer and picking up a towel. She handed it to Emmett. "Babe, can you please soak that in cold water and get us something with sugar in it?"

He nodded without looking at her and left the room. Rosalie stood over Bella, spread on her sheets, and put her hands on her hips.

"She took Ketamine. A lot of it. But it must have been at least two hours ago by now. She'll be okay." Then she straddled Bella, reached her hand back as far as it would go, and smacked Bella's cheek in a slap so loud it echoed and bounced around the room.

I looked at her, slack-jawed. "What the fuck-"

"My head." The rest of my sentence was lost as Bella opened her eyes and looked at Rosalie. "My head, Rose." Her voice was so small, so ashamed and lost, that I wanted to wrap my arms around her and protect her from the world.

"I know, baby. We're gonna get you some sugar and a cold towel."

Bella swallowed and closed her eyes, rolling over to her side. Rosalie got off the bed and shot me a nervous look, stepping out of the room while muttering something about Gatorade. I hesitantly sat beside her on the bed, carefully touching her face. Her skin felt feverish. Her eyes shot open, and she looked at me, fear, panic and pain in her eyes. "What are- How did you…?" She trailed off, swallowing and clearing her throat.

"Are you okay? Is there anything I can get you?"

She dropped her eyes and her jaw tightened. "No."

"I was so worried about you, Bella." I ran my fingers through her hair, greasy and stringy and messy. I still loved the feel of it.

She reached up and weakly swatted my hand away. "Well, I'm fine, so you can go."

I blinked. I blinked again. "Bella?" I didn't know what to ask, where the questions should have started. I didn't know where I wanted her to begin. I didn't even know what I wanted her to say.

She turned her eyes to me again, and I saw it there, like the worst kind of de ja vu imaginable, my worst nightmare coming to fruition. Anger. Hatred. Fury and loathing. Like the early days but worse. Like that day we went cliff-diving but worse. Magnified. Intensified. Like it had festered and grown since the night before. A raw determination that seemed to exhaust her, and a glistening moisture that couldn't have been tears, because her voice was weak but steady. "What the fuck are you even doing here?"

So harsh. Cutting. "I… went to Seattle to get you." I sounded dead already. My body was shutting down. I was so tired suddenly.

Her face briefly showed pain, but she hid it again so quickly I doubted I'd seen it. "Why the fuck did you do that? Fuck. Now I'm gonna need to drive back there in my fucking truck and get my bike. Nice one. Fucking great."

My throat closed up. Jesus, why did it hurt so much? I should've seen it coming. I should've known it was bound to happen. So why hadn't I? Why had I thought I could have her back? My heart broke, and I realized I was fighting tears. Fucking pussy. She looked at my face for a long time, her eyes infinitely deep and beautiful. She closed them.

"I'm tired." I nodded even though she couldn't see me, because I couldn't speak. I knew I had to leave, to save myself, to rescue the remains of my tattered and battered fucking heart. I knew that I _would_ cry, soon. But maybe I was just a fucking masochist, because I leaned down and kissed her warm temple, inhaling her, all of her, the sweat and cigarette smoke and oranges and flowers and even the horrible scent of that other guy. She stiffened underneath me, and I ran out of the room before she could say anything or yell at me or curse at me some more. Rosalie was in the hall with Emmett, and she looked at me curiously as I brushed past.

"Edward?" Emmett's voice was already far behind me. I was almost out of the house. I was almost in my car. And fuck, I could smell her everywhere, and as I started the engine, I peeled out of the driveway and drove too fast for Forks, and I clenched the wheel and gritted my teeth, and the little needle on the speedometer kept going up and up. I couldn't slow down, I couldn't stop. It was too fucking hard. Being in love with her was just too fucking hard.

***

Of course, when school resumed in early January, nothing had changed. My first day back at school, Jasper glared at me, clenching and unclenching his fists. Alice's eyes were sad and wide. Rosalie and Emmett exchanged nervous glances, but Bella never looked at me. Lauren tried talking to me, but I couldn't find the strength to acknowledge her existence, let alone her words. At one point during English, Berty asked me a question six times before Mike Newton nudged me into a response.

Jasper refused to speak a word to me during lunch, which was just as well considering I couldn't speak. Emmett's attempts at conversation fell flat when I couldn't manage more than a grunt whenever I did. I couldn't look at Bella. I couldn't look at Emmett and Rosalie either, because their eyes told me I was pitiful. Alice's eyes were even harder to meet.

Biology class was too much. I skipped and spent the hour in my car, not listening to music. Not smoking, either, because it made me think of that time we cut classes to go eat and fight and she took care of me the best way she knew how.

After the last bell, I trudged my way to my car, avoiding conversations and glances by staring at my feet. When I got inside, I sighed and looked up. The five of them were clustered together, and Alice was looking in my direction. Sometimes Jasper would try to get her attention, but she was fixated on me, and I thought of the phrase "if looks could kill." When she saw me looking she turned to say something to Bella, and everyone within earshot looked at her in shock.

Fuck it. Fuck all of it. It was too hard.

I drove home that day like I was hoping I'd crash and die. Probably I was, but I was too exhausted to realize it.

Little did I realize that first day was to be a template for how the rest of my days would go. The weeks wore on, and I missed more and more biology classes. At some point in time, Emmett stopped trying to draw me into conversations. I couldn't pinpoint when exactly, because I didn't notice it. Rather, I realized it was something that had stopped happening over time, and I was hard-placed to define that time. Sometimes, Bella missed school. Those days were easier, but only slightly.

At home, I did little. My music gathered dust on the shelves, because everything I listened to reminded me of her. I couldn't stop thinking about her stupid _roots_, and her fucking smile and her laugh when she made fun of me for not knowing the early inspirations of the bands that influenced My Chemical Romance. So I stopped listening to music.

Carlisle tried talking to me. He started throwing around words like 'catatonic', but I swatted him off my bed and managed to find my voice long enough to ask him to just leave me the fuck alone. For the most part, he did. He was worried, but he was helpless.

It was one day like any other when I was sitting in my car, waiting for the bell to ring, that I saw Lauren. My eyes would have passed over her in the same way they always did now, but my mind insisted I stop and notice, that something was different. Something was wrong. My sluggish brain tried to compute that difference. She was talking to Tyler Crowley, smiling at him in that flirtatious way she had often used on me. I realized suddenly that that too had stopped some time ago. I didn't know when. I was just about to give up on pinpointing what was wrong when she laughed, reaching her hand up and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Wait. Lauren had hair again?

It wasn't long like it used to be. No where even close. But it wasn't close cropped either. It actually looked pretty cute, and she clearly knew it. How long did it take hair to grow out that long? Was she wearing a wig? I looked up at the sky. It was cloudy, but it was always cloudy. What was the date?

I stepped out of my car, dazed, feeling strangely disoriented. I didn't know what I was searching for. Some kind of hint or clue as to what the date was. I searched a little frantically until I reached a tree with a flyer stapled to it, next to one of the picnic tables outside the buildings that were rarely ever used. The flyer was advertising tickets on sale for the Spring Formal dance. Spring? The date of the dance was April 14th. Coming soon, the flyer promised. There was another flyer close by, reminding seniors to schedule time with the school advisor to discuss graduation. So then, graduation was coming up, too?

I swallowed. Fuck. This couldn't be happening. April meant four months. Four months of my life had gone by, like something surreal. Four months I'd been drifting, too numb to feel anything, too scared to chase the numbness away. Four fucking months. Gone. I turned around to look at the school, and it looked strange and unfamiliar, like I was seeing it for the first time. And I gripped my hair in my fists and shook my head. What the fuck happened to me? Where the hell had I been?

The bell rang some time later, and I walked to class wide-eyed. I was seeing everything as though for the first time. The way people's eyes slid right over me, like I was a ghost. Like I was furniture. Like I wasn't even there. For the past four months, I probably wasn't.

I discovered it was April 9th. My mind reeled all over again at the realization that I had been dead to the world – and myself – for so long. It frightened me. Emmett seemed to notice something different about me in gym class, aiming a few unnecessarily forceful passes at my head with a basketball. Jasper turned his stoned blue eyes on me, and his eyes widened, looking momentarily lucid.

Because I was scared, terrified by my realization, because I wanted to feel something again, anything, even if it was just the indescribable agony of her proximity, I looked forward to her approach during lunch. My body felt it like I knew it would, and I listened to it this time. She sat beside me without glancing my way, and I stared at her.

She was so fucking beautiful.

I'd spent the past four months not looking at her, not speaking to her, not even picturing her or remembering her, and I was struck dumb by just how gorgeous she was all over again now that I was seeing her for the first time in too long. I breathed raggedly, and Emmett eyed me curiously.

She frowned at his expression, then followed his line of sight and saw me. I knew that being caught staring wasn't really what I was going for, but I couldn't look away. Her face registered several expressions in the following seconds. Surprise. Relief. Anguish. Sadness. I recognized them all, and none of them made any sense.

"Bella, can I talk to you for a second?" She turned in response to Jasper's request, and his expression worsened as he took in her face. "In private?"

She nodded and quickly got up as Jasper unceremoniously pushed Alice off his lap and led Bella by the hand, out of the cafeteria, out of my sight, who knew where and for what purpose. Alice sat in the chair he had deposited her in and grabbed me suddenly by the collar of my shirt. I yelped, blinking at her surprisingly strong grip. "Go. After. Them._Now_."

She was crying. I nodded, glancing at Emmett, and he looked uncomfortable. Worried. He nodded at me, and I was out of my seat as soon as Alice let go of my shirt. I heard them before I saw them, their shouts carrying from the parking lot. They were squared off against one another, Jasper with his hands holding her face so close he could kiss her without trying. She was gripping his wrists, yelling up at him, and I was jogging across the field with fire in my ears.

"It's none of your fucking business, Jasper!" She was on the verge of tears. I could hear it in the trembling of her voice.

Jasper glared at me again now that I was close, dropping his hands from her face and taking a step towards me. "Why don't you just back off for a second, Cullen. We're having a private discussion here."

"Fuck your private discussion, Jasper, you have issues with me you talk to _me_ about them. Leave her alone."

He made his face blank. "This is between me and Bella, so just butt out."

"Jazz, don't." Bella gripped his arm, and he turned to her, wrapping his arms possessively around her as he eyed me cautiously.

I heard the frantic footsteps of running behind me. I didn't care enough to look and see who it was. "Jasper, let's go back inside." Emmett's voice was low and menacing.

"I'm not ready to go back inside," Jasper hissed at him, gripping Bella more tightly. Her shoulders were hunched, her face buried in his chest.

"Stop it, Jazz." Bella's voice was muffled by his shirt.

"Jasper, I'm serious dude, let's go."

"Why don't you just shut up and stay the fuck out of this, Emmett?"

Emmett hissed. "Chill the fuck out, Jasper."

Jasper's eyes widened, and he gripped Bella more tightly, his eyes darting to each of us as though we were threatening to steal her away. "Bella," he murmured in her ear, and her hands reached around his waist. "Bella, say something."

"No."

"Bella. Say something!" His voice was pleading, and she suddenly pulled away and looked at a spot over his shoulder.

"That's it, Jasper Whitlock! That's the last straw!" All of us turned to see Alice standing a short distance away, her eyes narrowed and tears streaming down her cheeks. "Enough is enough. I won't be sloppy seconds. Especially not to _her_." Shaking her head, she marched off to her car, Jasper gazing after her with disbelief and horror on his face. I wanted to punch him.

"Nice fucking going, dickwad," Emmett rumbled, and Bella dropped her face in her hands and shook her head.

"Hey, eat shit!"

"Shut _up_, Jasper!" Bella clenched her hands into tiny fists, and I wondered if she was going to take a swing at him. I hoped she would. Making a frustrated noise, she pointed in the direction Alice had gone, where her shiny yellow Porsche was pulling out and disappearing. "You need to go after her. Now. You and I will talk later."

He swallowed, his face suddenly looking tired and pained. Nodding wordlessly, he jogged to his car, and Emmett shook his head and growled again.

"Bella." It felt good to say her name. Good like torture.

She shook her head and wouldn't look at me. "Don't, Edward. Just give it a rest." A thrill shot through me at hearing her speak my name. I couldn't go back to ignoring how devastating having her in my life was. How devastating _not_ having her in my life was.

"It's over with him. Listen to _me_ now."

She turned to me, and I saw pain and bitterness in her face. Her eyes showed me pain I had previously thought her incapable of harboring. She shook her head like I'd said something ridiculous. "Don't be silly. I've always listened to you."

Emmett rubbed his face tiredly. "Bella, just tell him the truth."

She stiffened minutely. "There's nothing to hear."

"You know," I started, and though my voice was still hoarse with disuse I felt my sense of self returning to me. I felt it coming back, and my body was tingling like a limb that had fallen asleep and was now pins and needles. "It almost sounds like you have a fucked up reason not to listen to me."

She bit her lip and stared at her feet.

"It almost sounds like maybe I should be the one doing the listening."

At this she looked at me, and her face was a strange mixture of fear and hope and anger and hurt. "Jasper is just some guy who got too attached to the girl he lost his virginity to. Who I fuck is none of his business." She eyed me then, as though considering fucking me, but there was no lust in her eyes. Just a butcher looking at a piece of meat. It made me shudder.

"Bella, get a fucking grip." Emmett sounded disgusted and tired. "Just tell him the truth."

She shook her head at Emmett, her mouth opening and closing without a sound. Hugging herself, she turned around and walked away to her truck, leaving me there to wonder how even after four months, I still didn't understand her at all.

***

I suppose it was coming when Jasper marched right up to me the next morning at school and punched my face in. Emmett got hold of him after a few good shots, and Rosalie screamed at him for being a stupid cock. Bella and Alice stood a fair distance away, Alice with tears in her eyes, Bella looking bored.

"Fucking hell, Jasper. What the fuck is your problem?"

Jasper hissed and made another lunge at me, but Emmett easily kept him away from me. "Cool it!" He turned to look at me then. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

A small crowd was gathering to watch the spectacle. New Kid vs Jasper. Fucking sweet.

"You don't deserve her, you bastard!" Jasper was trying to get at me again, and I shook my head.

I didn't deserve her? My mind presented me with the image of her, dressed in white like in my dream. Bella in my dream, asking if I loved her. She looked like an angel. Bella standing at her window, waving good night. Bella on the hood of the Jeep, bathed in starlight. Cold and wet, shivering in my arms in the hollow of a tree. Bella in my bed. Bella half naked and strung out in James' lap. No, I didn't deserve her. But… "You don't deserve her, either," I spoke, and he stopped struggling against Emmett immediately, staring at me with shock. It was just as well, because Emmett dropped his arms and stared, too. "No one deserves her. She's a goddess."

I looked at Bella. She was staring at me, her mouth slightly open. She was shocked, too. When she realized she'd been caught looking, she snapped it shut and tried to look indifferent. When that failed, she turned and ran into the woods.

"Bella!" It was a fucking moronic thing to do. I knew it even as I ran after her that I was an idiot, a big fucking idiot, but it was all I ever seemed to be around Bella, and I was done trying so hard to control it. "Bella!" I was vaguely aware of shouts behind me, of Emmett and Jasper calling her as well. I didn't stop to listen to anyone. I didn't stop for anything. I was done controlling it. I wanted to run after her, so I did. I wanted to catch her, so I did. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and press her back to my chest when I'd caught her, so I did. She struggled, gasping and panting in my grip, but I wrestled her down to her knees, the both of us on our knees, kneeling in the woods, with my arms around her. It felt so right to have my arms around her again.

"Let me go!"

"Why are you doing this to me?"

"Stop it! Let me go!" Her voice cracked with rage, and I flinched. It felt like she'd slapped me again.

"Bella, why are you doing this to me?"

She suddenly went limp in my arms, and I heard her sniffle. Oh, God. She was crying. "I wanted to stay away," she said, and her voice was so small. My heart broke. "I wanted to do the right thing and stay away. I didn't want to be here like this."

Slowly, carefully, I maneuvered her in my arms so that she was facing me, and tears were running down her face. I swallowed a lump in my throat, because fuck if I didn't feel like crap watching her cry. "What do you mean? I don't understand!" I heard the frustration in my voice. It made me cringe.

"Edward," she whispered, her hands on my face, and I lost myself in her eyes. I watched, mesmerized, as she brought her face closer to mine, and I lost all capacity to think when I felt her breath against my lips. As if in a dream, Bella Swan touched her lips to mine and kissed me the softest, sweetest most loving kiss I'd ever experienced.

My lips moved against her, and I groaned. She was killing me. She was fucking killing me. Mustering my strength, I took her face in my hands and stopped her, panting and trying to regain use of my thoughts. "Why are you doing this to me?" I asked her again.

She whimpered. "Because I'm weak. Because I'm scared. Because I don't know how to stay away."

I opened my eyes and looked at her. Her face was anguished. It made my heart clench. "Please," I pleaded, unsure what I was asking for.

She leaned forward and kissed me again, and I knew I was lost to her. The battles I had won before were meaningless. I had lost the war. I wrapped my arms around her, deepening the kiss, feeling my heart race as she put her slender arms around my neck. The leather of that jacket that had looked so perfect on her rubbed against my shoulders and I loved the sensation. I knew that for the rest of my life, I wouldn't be able to feel leather without thinking of this moment.

"Edward," she murmured, and I pulled away, leaning my forehead against hers. "Edward, do you love me?" Her voice was small again, and so uncertain. I couldn't believe my ears.

"Yes," I hissed, clutching her more tightly in my arms. "God, yes. I want you more than anything."

She whimpered again, and I felt her shake her head against me. "What am I doing?"

"Bella, please," I spoke against the soft skin of her neck. "Let me have you. Please, let me. I swear I'll treat you well. I know I don't deserve you, but please let me try."

She shook her head against me again. "Don't say that, Edward. Don't think that."

I held her face again, pulling it away from my chest so I could see her eyes. I knew I couldn't conceal the longing in my eyes. I knew she would see it there. I hoped it would convince her to let me try.

"Can you take me home, please?"

I nodded, struck mute by this goddess before me. Getting up, I held her waist and guided her slowly back to the parking lot. She stumbled occasionally, but I was always there to catch her. I told myself that if she let me, I always would be.

The parking lot was empty when we got there, everyone gone back inside the buildings or somewhere else. Emmett's Jeep was gone. Alice's Porsche was, too. I walked her to the passenger side of my Volvo, and it had been so long since I'd done this my heart was soaring. I opened the door for her before getting in and starting the car. As we drove away from the school, I turned to her and swallowed. "Bella?"

"Hmm?" She was looking out the window. I couldn't see her face.

"Is it 'later'?"

She turned to me suddenly, and her face was resigned. She looked like she'd been sentenced to the gallows. "Yeah, it's about that time."

I nodded, and we rode in silence. At her house, Bella rubbed her face with her hands, sighing. "Do you remember your first day at school, Edward?"

I nodded. "You hated me."

She smiled sadly. "I suppose I did. I was angry at you. See, I'd sworn to myself I'd never let anyone be in a position to matter to me again. I was over it, the emotional trials and tribulations of loving someone, anyone. I guess you know now that Jasper and I didn't do so great as a couple."

I swallowed and shut my eyes. "I figured."

"We were together for two years. It was so intense, so real and… passionate."

I groaned and opened my eyes, unable to look at her. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because Jasper was the first time I thought I could be... I don't know, _good._ He meant the world to me. And I left him." Her voice broke, and I turned to see her on the verge of tears. "Because we were all wrong for each other, and he wouldn't see that, and I was scared. I broke up with him, and he was ruined."

I stared at her in disbelief. I remembered something about her mother gone and pictured her father pining. I drew a parallel, Jasper, so hung up on Bella it was sickening, and Bella's flighty mother gone for good, a horrible excuse for a human being.

Oblivious to my revelation, she went on. "When Alice asked him out, he turned her down the first two times because he was hoping I'd change my mind. He was hoping I'd take him back but I didn't. So he dated Alice. And I was sitting there every day, watching Emmett and Rosalie and Jasper and Alice, and I was so unbelievably alone. I _watched _him fall in love with her. I saw how perfect they were together. I saw her be for him what I could never be. So I went to Jacob."

Jacob Black. The story just got better and better.

"I don't know what Rosalie told you about him, but Jacob saved me from James. I owed him. He never told Charlie, and I was so grateful. He didn't try to force me into anything, he just told me how he felt about me, that the whole time we were growing up together he was so in love me, and he could never forgive himself if anything bad happened to me. He was sincere, and he made me feel like I didn't have to think or make decisions. I never loved him, not really the way he wanted me to, but I couldn't stop seeing him, and whenever it got too hard being around Jasper and Alice, I ran to Jake. He was there for me, no questions or anything, even though everyone hated him so much. It wasn't fair to him, you know?"

I leaned my forehead against the steering wheel. I felt sick.

"I gave him the wrong idea, I think. He thought we were more than we were, and… it was all my fault. He _loved _me, and I used him. Maybe he got a little possessive or whatever, but he was just harmless." She paused and breathed deeply. "Do you remember coming to get me in Seattle?"

I groaned. At this rate I really would be sick. "I remember, Bella."

She nodded. "I fucked James for the K."

Christ. I didn't want to hear anymore.

"Do you believe in love at first sight?"

I stared at her. "What?"

She wasn't looking at me, but her face was serious. "Do you believe in love at first sight, Edward?"

I swallowed.

"I've loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you that day in the cafeteria. I felt it right away, and it only took me a minute to realize what it was. I'd fallen in love with you immediately, just like that. And I hated you for it." She turned to me, and her brown eyes held an echo of the fury I'd seen in her eyes that day. "I told myself I was done with love, and then you came along and forced me to love you in spite of myself. I felt helpless and angry, and I wanted it to stop so… I pushed you away. I wanted you to hate me."

I choked and shook my head. How could she have done that? How could she have rationalized it to herself? "Why would you do that?"

She covered her face with her hands. "I wanted you to hate me so that you'd be horrible to me. If you were horrible to me, then I'd learn to hate you, too. Not just hate you because I was angry, but really hate you. I desperately didn't want to love you."

"You're insane!" I heard the accusation in my voice, but I heard the hurt there as well.

"But you weren't horrible to me, even though I was so horrible to you. I couldn't understand it. You were perfectly kind to me despite everything. And it made me crazy, so I ran away."

"Jacob Black."

She shook her head. "Further away."

I growled. "Seattle."

She nodded, uncovering her face and looking at me. "I spent the better part of three days in Seattle. I- I don't remember what I did. I was never… I just lost myself. I finally pulled myself together enough to leave when I ran out of money, but I couldn't go back to school. So I went to Jake, and he knew something was wrong. I spent days there, battling with myself, the part that wanted to love you and the self-preservation that prevented me from doing so. He started prying small parts of the story out of me. After a while, he told me I had to go back and face you. Probably, if I met you and got to know you, I'd realize you were just as dull and mindless as all the other boys, and I'd get over my silly infatuation. So I came back."

I swallowed and put up my hand to interrupt her. "That day he brought you to school. That… display."

She bit her lip and dropped her gaze to her hands, clenching and unclenching in her lap. "That was… not my idea. Jake said it would be fun, but I think maybe he just wanted… to stake a claim."

I palmed my face. The memory of them wrapped up around one another haunted me behind my closed lids.

"I got to know you, then. And you were wonderful. Everything I learned about you just made me fall deeper and deeper in love with you, and it made me angry all over again. But then I stopped looking for faults in you. I stopped trying to fit everything you said into a negative space. And I… liked… being around you. I enjoyed your company. You were… just wonderful."

I wanted to tell her how I thought she was wonderful, too. But so much of what she'd just told me angered me. So much of it was unfair. Some parts of it seemed like such a waste now.

We could have spent that time more wisely.

"Bella," I whispered. I could only whisper. "What about… Christmas?"

She bit her lip. "When we went cliffdiving, I just… panicked. You saw me, all the ugly parts, and I was convinced that when you saw them you would get over me and move on, and then I could move on, too. But you were so nice. You didn't even take advantage of me. You wanted to, but you didn't. I couldn't understand it. Until I realized that, maybe, you loved me, too. Maybe not as much as I loved you, but you did. It scared me. And I was angry at you all over again, for complicating my life and making it difficult, for making me want you when I couldn't have you, and for making yourself available to me when it was just destined to fail. And then in the car, when you kissed me, I realized that you might have felt the same way about me after all. So I ran again."

"You… ran?"

She nodded, and her eyes were ashamed. "It was more horrible than any of the other times. I wanted to forget you. I wanted to forget everything. I ran out of money, fast. Then James made me an offer."

I punched the steering wheel and the horn let out a shriek. "Fuck!" I tugged my hair and refused to look at her. I couldn't fucking stand it.

"One day I woke up and realized suddenly that it was Christmas. It was Christmas, and I was fucking high in some whore's apartment, sleeping with her pimp for my fix. I went home, and Charlie was so relieved to see me. I felt like shit. Because I was fucking poison. I poisoned everything. I poisoned Charlie's life, and I poisoned Jacob's, and I poisoned Jasper's, and even when I was a fucking fetus I poisoned my mother's. And I was poisoning yours."

I shook my head, but I still couldn't look at her.

"I was so bad to Jake. I told him to back off, I told him he had no claim on me, that he was delusional, and that I didn't love him."

"He hurt you."

"He just grabbed me a little. Nothing serious. I wanted to say good-bye to you, so I came to your house. I wanted you to turn me away, to reject me and throw me out on my ass. I wanted you to say good-bye, too. That night wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. And I told myself I was just saying goodbye. A full good-bye, and I would never poison your life again. It was so natural to kiss you, to touch you, to fall asleep in your arms."

It had felt natural to me, too. I hadn't known she'd come to me after marathon fucking and drug binging with James. No wonder he'd looked so smug. I was so naïve.

"I was in a panic the next morning. So… I went back to Seattle. I wanted to get lost again. I didn't expect to see you again so soon. I was terrified, and I was ashamed. Because you knew. I was ugly and dirty on the inside and you knew. So I pushed you away because I suddenly realized… I didn't want you to say good-bye. I wouldn't have been able to stand it."

So she'd said her own good-bye. I was like a pingpong ball that she'd tossed around her mind, ricocheting off of every surface without knowing why or for how long. At her mercy. Jerked around. Fucked with. Hurt. Abused. I had never even known why. "Didn't you care about my feelings at all?"

She bit her lip at the venom in my voice. She had known that I loved her from that day on the beach, and had hurt me in the cruelest, vilest ways imaginable. To save herself. She gave me no answer. I knew she had none. She was crying again, her hands clenched into fists in her lap. Her face was determined. Resigned. "I tried not to love you. But I can't anymore. Edward, you asked why I did this to you, and now you know. You said you wanted me. Do you want me now?"

My heart raced. My palms were slick with sweat. My ears rang. I had wanted her so much just an hour ago. Did I want her now? Now that I knew?

"I think you should go."

She looked at me, no surprise in her face. Only a quiet resignation. And a hint of agony. I looked away. I couldn't look at her right now.

Nodding, she opened the car door and stepped outside, and as soon as she shut the door again I drove off. I tried my best not to look back, but when I glanced in my rearview mirror, she was still standing on the lawn, her head down, her body limp, as the sky opened up above us.

**AN/**

**I'm suspecting some unhappy readers right about now...**

**Due to connectivity issues this chapter ended up on Twi'd sooner than on here, but hell. Maybe I'll put up the next one here faster than it ends up there. Just for cosmic balance.**


	14. Chapter 14

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

**I wanted to wrap it up this chapter, but this was long and I had trouble with the end and I didn't want to make you all wait any longer.**

**I'm totally sucking at responding to my reviews right now, and I am so very sorry for it, RL has just been busy as all get-go and I haven't forgotten you and I read them all and they make me squee and giggle and nice things like that. Thanks for those of you who take the time, especially those that reviewed to every single chapter. The win you people are made of, it's **_**wild.**_

**Brace yourselves, children.**

Chapter 15 – Mind Over Matter aka "Murphy's Law"

When I got to school the next morning, Alice threw her arms around my neck and sobbed into my shoulder. I held her tightly, seeking comfort as much as giving it. I had to bend down, and when I straightened her feet lifted off the ground. She was so small, so tiny in my arms, and she was hurting so much.

Rosalie had her hand on Emmett's arm, eyeing us with a strange expression on her face. Jasper was nowhere to be seen. Bella wasn't there either.

Bella. At the thought of her I lowered my own head into Alice's neck and clenched my jaw. I was done hurting for her. I was done bouncing around at her whims. I was done. I held Alice tighter and she cried harder.

"Let's get out of here," I murmured, and she nodded immediately.

"Wait!" I looked up and Alice tightened her grip on me, cutting off most of my air supply. Jasper was taking quick strides towards us, his face determined, and I growled.

"Not this anymore." I extricated myself from Alice's grip and pushed her behind me, and she clung to the back of my shirt like a child. Locking my jaw, I lifted my chin and stared at Jasper. "What do you want, now?"

"I need to talk to you, Alice, please," he dropped suddenly to his knees and I blinked.

"Fuck off," came her muffled voice from behind me, the sentiment behind the words only half-hearted.

"I'm begging you, Alice, give me a chance to apologize, I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you I swear if you just give me the chance to."

"Let's go, Edward," she tugged on the back of my shirt again and dove into my car. Jasper watched her with devastated eyes. I considered kicking him in the face for a few seconds, but dismissed the idea in favor of driving off with the love of his life instead.

He got back up to his feet slowly as we drove out of the parking lot, and Alice gave sad sniffles from her seat next to me where she hugged her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth.

"The bastard. The stupid stupid _bastard._"

I nodded. Honestly I had expected him to go after Bella now that he was free to. I wasn't sure what to make of his newfound loyalty to Alice. "Where do you want to go?" I asked her, my voice distant and weak.

She shrugged. "Home."

I nodded. I would take her home. Then take myself someplace. Not home. Not where the vision of Bella in my bed and in my life was so vivid. Somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Outside her ridiculously large mansion, Alice looked at me expectantly. "You coming? My mother never manages to keep track of the liquor cabinet because she always gets too wasted to remember how much she's had."

Did I want to? I looked at Alice, pale and tiny and red-faced with tears. She kinda looked the way I felt. Why the fuck not?

I followed her into the foyer and up the stairs. She gestured to a door and I went in to wait for her while she grabbed something to drink. It was her bedroom, I realized, bright and vivid and flowery and so Alice I could've picked it out of a lineup. I sat at her vanity, which was littered with little bottles of cosmetics with French names. I picked one up. Gold dust moisturizer? Fucking insane. Bella would laugh.

I violently pushed the thought of Bella out of my head and placed the bottle back in its place. Fuck Bella. She was probably laughing now. Laughing at the new kid she managed to fuck over royally. Sighing, I saw my senseless accusation for what it was. She wasn't laughing. She was probably back in Seattle, forgetting me the way she always wanted to. Was she hurting? Heartbroken? Probably. I wasn't sure how I felt about that, though the gaping hole in my chest told me she deserved it. She had it coming. She did it to me first.

I looked at my own reflection in the lit mirror in front of me. It felt like I hadn't really looked at myself in so long. The past four months had beaten me down. I was a wreck. My cheeks were hollow, my skin papery and dry, my chin covered in stubble because I only shaved when I absolutely had to. My hair was dishelved and too long. I needed a haircut. I needed to eat and I needed to sleep. The shadows under my eyes were so purple it looked like I'd been punched in the face. I looked the way I felt, too. I wanted to feel worse. I wanted to look worse. I wanted it to stop and I wanted to feel ok again.

"Tequila, gin, whiskey." I turned to look at Alice and she immediately recognized the anguish in my face. Her own face crumpled and she walked over to me, putting the bottles down on the vanity and sitting in my lap. She threw her arms around my neck again and I held her tightly to me, longing for something, anything that can chase the memories and the hurt and the games away. "I know," she whispered.

And she did.

I sighed. Alice smelled like geraniums and something exotic and French. It wasn't Bella, but it was nice. I would have enjoyed it if I hadn't been so consumed with thoughts and images of Bella. She'd taken over my life. If I'd thought I was obsessed before, I was doubly so now. Obviously I'd been voodooed or something. _Obviously._

"She said she loved me," I whispered. I knew Alice heard me because she stiffened minutely in my lap. "She loved me from the moment she saw me."

"I know."

I pulled back and looked at her. "You knew?"

She shook her head. "I said I _know_. I just found out last night. Rosalie said Bella was at her house, and she was a mess. I was kinda surprised to be honest. I figured she'd go to Jacob or something." Did Alice know about Seattle? "I told Rosalie to deal with her on her own. I wasn't going to take the time out to comfort _her._"

My initial reaction was to defend her. I was shocked at how quickly the impulse rose in me. I bit back the words and nodded at her to continue.

She looked at my chest for a moment before meeting my eyes again. "Rosalie said she was more broken than she'd ever seen her before."

I blinked and looked away quickly. So she wasn't laughing. Good.

I inhaled her some more, trying to push the scent of Bella out of my mind and resting my forehead on her shoulder. She played with my hair absentmindedly, and I knew she was someplace else.

"I think I did it, too." She stopped playing with my hair and tried to look at me, but I stubbornly kept my head on her shoulder so she wouldn't see my face. "I loved her from the moment I saw her. I think it just took me longer to figure it out. It's probably why I let her get away with being such a bitch to me."

Alice laughed, a haunted tinkling sound that held no humor. "So you're meant to be then. What a waste."

I lifted my head at last to look at her. "What are you talking about?"

"You're soulmates, like me and Jasper. You can't fight it any more than I can. You knew on some level from the moment you saw her that she was _it_for you. you were drawn to her and she was drawn to you, and no matter how much shit went on in between you two love each other, don't you?

My jaw worked. "It's not like that, ok? She fucked with me. She played me like a fucking toy."

"She loves you the best way she knows how. It's not ok but it's not her fault either."

Because she loved me. She had laid it out, the truth in all its fucked up glory, bared her flawed and imperfect soul to me, and it hadn't been good enough for me. She had been so scared of loving me, and in the end it had fucked her up. She had been right. The whole time I told myself I was in love with her and she was perfect. But she wasn't perfect. I just thought she was because I loved her flaws as much as I loved her good qualities. And as soon as I saw how imperfect she really was I'd pussied out. I'd hurt her. I'd fucked up.

I was such a fucking shithead.

But she was such a fucking _bitch_.

"Don't think about it so much right now," she shook her head, and I looked at her with new eyes.

Alice was stylish, and cute, and fun, and witty, and she was so sweet and caring and full of energy and life. "Why couldn't I have loved you instead?"

She smiled at me, and it looked semi-real. I couldn't help it. I smiled back. "Because that would have been too easy, Edward."

I nodded though I didn't understand, and she ruffled my hair playfully and got up from my lap. With something new stirring in my recently awakened consciousness, I poured us each a shot of tequila, and we let the ancient charm of inebriation take us away from the things that would hurt us.

***

Carlisle came by to pick me up. I wasn't sure how or when it happened, but Alice must have called him to tell him I was too drunk to drive. He half pulled half carried me into the backseat of his Benz, and I complained that he smelled like hospital the whole time. Had I been more sober, I would have applauded his patience with me.

There were other conversations, but I couldn't remember a word later.

I probably fell asleep before we got home, because the next thing I remembered was waking up in my bed with the curtains drawn and two little white pills on my nightstand next to a glass of water. I didn't even want to know what time it was. I didn't think I could bring myself to care.

Studiously ignoring every timepiece in the house, I dragged myself downstairs and set up the coffeemaker. With sticky eyes, I sat at the kitchen table and waited for something to come back to me about what had gone wrong. Why was it so hard? Loving Bella had always been hard, but did it have to be so hard to get over her, too? I could think of so many reasons to hate her, and yet not one of them made me love her an iota less.

My stomach churned, and the stench of coffee suddenly made me sick. I dragged myself away from the kitchen and went back upstairs, determined to shower the sickness off myself. I took longer than I usually did standing under the water and trying not to think, and only turned off the water and grabbed my towel when the hot water ran cold. In my room I went through my pockets and found my phone. Six missed called. Four voicemails. Three messages.

The calls were mostly from an unknown number. One from Alice, and one from, of all people, Jasper. The voicemail from Alice asked if I was ok and told me to call her. There was another one from Alice that had almost the exact same message, and I figured she was drunk and had forgotten that she'd already called. Jasper's voicemail was a lot of awkward silence and throat clearing and a strained apology. Right, like that fixed anything. The last voicemail was from the unknown number.

"Edward, this is Charlies Swan, Bella's father." I fumbled and dropped my phone, and I had to rewind the message and listen to it again. Why the fuck was Charlie Swan calling me? I panicked as I listened. "Now I've been speaking to Dr. Cullen here about some things you've told him and I wanted to thank you for bringing them to my attention. I assure you that I'll be handling the situation with your father's help and we're going to make sure things like this don't happen again. I'd like to ask you to keep an eye out for Bella and make sure all her friends do the same. We need to get her better, you know?"

I swallowed and shut my eyes. When the hell did I tell my dad anything about Bella?

I groaned. I had been so so very inebriated last night. And I was such a talkative drunk.

"Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks. If you ever need anything, my door is always open."

I shook my head in disbelief and stared at my phone, flipping open my new messages. Rosalie telling me she'd picked up my homework for me. Dad asking me to call him soon. And one from Bella.

_Open your door._

Open my door? Sluggishly, I got off my bed and took the stairs carefully. There was no way. That message must have been sent hours ago. I took a deep breath and opened my front door.

And she was sitting there on the steps, her back to me, but she turned her head to look at me with her big brown eyes when she heard the door open. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe she was here.

"Hey."

_Oh fuck no. "_Oh fuck no." I moved to close the door but she was sober and faster, and her hand was on my arm sending electric currents up and down my spine. "No, Bella, _no._ No more fuckery, I'm done."

"Edward, please, I'm sorry, please let me in." The sincerity in her voice shocked me so much, I dropped my arms from the door and she pushed past me into the foyer. I turned to her, my head still crawling through my hangover, and waited for her to do something else that would hurt me. When I made no move to do so she shut the door, locking it once for good measure before walking towards my kitchen. "I'll make you some coffee. You must feel like hell."

In a stupor, I followed her, and like a baby I let her put me on a stool while she awkwardly moved around my kitchen looking for mugs and cream. "Does your dad know you're here?"

Her shoulders stiffened as she placed a steaming mug of coffee – complete with sugar and cream – in front of me. She sat in a stool opposite me and shrugged. "He dropped me off."

I nodded, stirring my coffee and avoiding looking at her, because I knew if I looked at her I'd get weak.

"I was kind of surprised when your dad showed up last night."

I looked up at her through my lashes. "It wasn't my idea."

She nodded and blushed. I wondered what she was thinking. "He told us you hadn't been yourself for a few months. He hadn't really known why, but we talked last night."

I snorted. "You talked to my father?" I wouldn't believe it even if I saw it on tape.

"He's a stern guy. Very firm. Nothing like Charlie. No one's ever really talked to me like that before…" she trailed off, picking at her sleeve and hiding behind her hair. I wrapped my hands around my coffee to keep from reaching out to brush it out of her face. I was done going down that road with her.

_It's too hard._

"I think Charlie was mostly relieved that someone came out and said what probably everyone's been thinking all along. And in practically the same breath offered a solution. It's kinda like…" she trailed off again, and I took a long sip of my coffee to keep from saying anything to encourage her. She looked up at me, her blush so prominent, more beautiful than I'd ever seen in my life. My heart raced. It hurt. I clenched my jaw. "It's almost like no one cared enough to say anything, and no one cared enough to fix me."

I snorted and she dropped her eyes. "You didn't give people much of a chance, did you?"

She shook her head slowly, and I hated seeing her so sad. "You cared, though."

Fuck.

"You probably cared more than anyone had ever cared, didn't you? And I fucked up, didn't I?"

She really did.

"Edward I'm sorry." She lifted her head so I could see her face, but she wouldn't meet my eyes. "I'm so so sorry."

"You need help."

She nodded. "Your dad gave Charlie someone's number. I'm going to see her next week." She ran her hand through her hair a few times, chewing her lip. "I'm probably not going to be attending anywhere this fall. I might need to take some time out to figure things out here. Not just me, with Charlie, too."

I nodded in response. I was glad. I was relieved she'd be taking the time out to do whatever it was she needed to do to get better. But I was angry at her, and angry at Carlisle. Why did it have to be now that it was too late for us?

"Is it too late for us?"

Had I said it out loud? No. But she was thinking it, too. Her phone rang, something I didn't recognize, and she sighed and answered.

"Hey. Yeah I'm here inside with him now. Ok. Hold on." She held her phone out to me and I eyed it warily. "It's my dad. He wants to talk to you."

I swallowed, taking the phone from her with cautious fingers. "Hello, Sir."

"Hey, Edward. Sorry about this, I just wanted to make sure she was still there. I can't keep an eye on her every second, you know, but I can do what I can to at least try and keep her safe."

I nodded though he couldn't see me. "Yes, Sir. I understand."

"Thanks, son. Can you put Bella back on please?"

I handed the phone back to Bella, and she listened with sorrowful eyes to her father. I couldn't hear him, but I imagined he was giving her orders. A minute later she hung up. "Sorry."

I shrugged. Of all the things she could be sorry for, and there were many, this wasn't even close to the top of the list.

We sat in awkward silence while I finished my coffee, and she got up wordlessly to wash the mug. She poured herself one, loading it with sugar and cream before bringing it back and sitting across from me again. We sat a foot apart, silent and empty and utterly exhausted. When I looked at her face I saw the shadows under her eyes, I saw the sunken skin of her cheeks, and I knew she was suffering. I tried to imagine how long she'd been suffering, ignoring her problems and going through the most painful of motions, again and again for years. What had I told Carlisle last night that had Charlie Swan so trusting of me instead of threatening me with a gun?

"I'm scared, Edward." I looked at her in disbelief. _She just doesn't know what to do with herself_, Rosalie had tried to explain, and I saw it so clearly now it was a wonder I ever missed it before.

"You were horrible to me." I was embarrassed at the naked pain in my voice.

I knew she heard it, because she winced. "I was so wrong and so selfish. I'm sorry, Edward."

She was sorry. It wouldn't give me all that time back.

"I know I can't ask you to forgive me. But I love you, and nothing that's happened has changed that."

"You watched me stumble around like a zombie for four months. Why didn't you try to fix it?"

"I thought you were better off without me," she whispered, and I heard her shame. "I'm so sorry."

I stared at her, and I knew she meant it. It was shitty, but it was what it was. She had simply loved me the best way she knew how, and it wasn't ok, but it wasn't her fault. We sat in silence, and the sound of the garage door opening and closing had us both staring at the countertops instead of each other. Carlisle walked into the kitchen, eyeing us suspiciously. "Bella, your father asked me to take you home."

She nodded, glancing at me and sliding off of her stool. "Bye, Edward." I stubbornly looked away. Because I was a shithead and I couldn't forgive her yet.

Carlisle gave me a look that clearly communicated we would be having a long conversation when he got home later, then they were both gone.

It was weird, knowing Bella and my dad had engaged in a heart-to-heart of sorts. I wondered what they would talk about on the way to her place, and I hoped it wasn't me. Or maybe I hoped they _would_ talk about me. I didn't know.

I called Alice, and she asked me to fill her in. I told her a sketchy outline of my day and asked her about hers.

"Jasper came by to talk. I kinda threw him out, but he'll be back if he knows what's good for him."

I chuckled and she laughed, too. "Do you think you can really forgive him, Alice? He was a pretty big dick to you for a pretty long time."

She was quiet, and I could almost hear her thinking. "I know he isn't perfect. But I've already forgiven him. I just want him to take the time to think about how much he wants to be with me. He doesn't love her, not really. He just feels like they have unfinished business because they had to end. She was his first love, and he failed her, and he doesn't know how to fix that and stay friends with her."

I thought about her words. They seemed to make sense, and almost fit in with Bella's dismissal of his attention as a guy who couldn't get over the girl that was his first. "So just like that, you can forgive him?"

She tsked. "There's no 'just like that' to it at all. It's not easy. Maybe in a perfect world real love _is_ easy, and it makes sense and all the pieces fall into place. But this is it as far as I'm concerned. We fell in love with hideously imperfect people, and it's just hard sometimes."

"I thought it was too hard loving Bella."

"And now?"

"It's still too hard."

She sighed. "I can't make you forgive her, Edward."

"I know, Alice."

"But I think you should try."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Were you there at all when she was fucking me over?"

"Oh don't be so melodramatic." The irritation in her voice shocked me almost as much as the fact that she was defending Bella. "I saw what she did to you, but I saw what she went through to do it. Maybe boys are just blind or stupid or braindead or something, but Bella Swan hurt when she hurt you, and even though you were the target she didn't get to walk away unharmed."

"So you'd sympathize with a perpetrator as much as the victim?"

"Don't be naïve. Bella is a lot of things but a perpetrator isn't one of them."

I waited for her to say something else, and she waited for me to respond. I couldn't. I was too angry.

"Get some rest, Edward. I'll see you at school tomorrow."

"Sure thing."

And I'd see Bella, too.

***

We sat squared off in his study, Carlisle behind the desk, me in the seat facing him. I felt like he was trying to intimidate me by initiating this conversation on his turf, but I only felt resentment, both old and new, bubbling up inside me.

"Edward, I've been an absent father."

I snorted. Yeah, no shit.

"But that doesn't mean you get to be a troubled teen."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm not troubled, Dad. I just had some girl trouble."

He eyed me sternly. "Are you on drugs?"

"Carlisle!"

"Answer me."

I bristled and grit my teeth. "No."

He stared at me for a beat longer, almost as though he could pick the truth out of my head like a file from his cabinet. "Fine. Is there a drinking problem I should be worried about?"

I rolled my eyes again, slumping in the leather chair. "No. I drink socially, but it's not a problem."

His mouth became a thin line and he shook his head slightly, but he said nothing. "Bella Swan. You've been in love with her all year. Why didn't you tell me?"

I wanted to say something rude and snippy, but something held me back. "I didn't think you'd be interested."

"Of course I'd be interested, son. Did you ever doubt that I cared for you? I know I've been busy but I'm still your father."

"I don't doubt that you care for my well-being."

He stopped, understanding dawning on his features and I shifted, uncomfortable. I wasn't good at this shit. "Edward, I-"

"What did you tell Bella's dad?"

Carlisle stared at his hands folded in front of him at his desk. "I told him she had classic signs of clinical depression. She used drugs because she didn't know how to self-soothe. She has text book abandonment issues, and her outbursts were the only self-preservation she knew and understood. I talked to him about treatments, and possibly some medication. I referred him to Tanya. She's the best teen-therapist in the state."

I nodded. It sounded about right, but it was all mumbo-jumbo to me. "What did you tell him about me?"

He sighed and looked at me cautiously. "I told him you were in love with her, and that you were concerned for her, but that she pushed you away and you weren't trained to deal with this kind of behavior."

"What did you tell Bella?"

He continued to look at me, searching for something in my face before shaking his head and standing up. "That is between the two of us."

I stood up too, seeing that the conversation was over.

"I can't say I'm not disappointed in you, Edward. But I want to make one thing very clear. You are my son. You're the only family I have left in the world. And whether or not you see it or believe it, I _do_ care about you. All of you." He shifted from one foor to the other and I did the same. We were probably more alike like that than I ever noticed before. "Will you promise to talk to me the next time you feel like you're struggling with something? I may not always approve, but I'll always listen because I'll always care."

I nodded, embarrassed for him. It couldn't have been easy for him to say any of that.

I was at the door when he stopped me again. "Edward, I've been meaning to tell you. I'm thinking of asking Esme to marry me."

I turned around to face him, shocked. "Marry you?"

He shuffled some papers around his desk to avoid my gaze and nodded. "I haven't felt this way about anyone since your mother. I don't know that I ever will."

I leaned against the door and stared at my feet. "She makes you happy."

"She does."

"And the two of you are in love."

"We are."

I swallowed a lump in my throat. My initial reaction was to be angry, but I knew it was just loyalty to my mother that fueled that ugly emotion.

Carlisle had always been a dumbass about this, sacrificing years of his own happiness to wallow in his grief over my mother. This was a big step for him. He wouldn't have even considered it if it weren't truly serious.

"At least someone around here would be able to cook," I said lamely.

Carlisle chuckled, seeming to release a lot of his tension. "Yes, it would be a pleasant change, wouldn't it?"

"Yeah, Dad. It would."

And I left quickly before he could think of anything else to throw at me.

***

The chief dropped her off in his cruiser, and she didn't glare at anyone on her way to her class. She caught my eye once, and quickly looked away in embarrassment. She sat slumped in her seat next to me during lunch, avoiding Jasper almost as much as he was avoiding her.

I stared at Rosalie and wondered if she knew what was going to happen with her mom and my dad, and decided she needed to work it out with her mother when it came. I was no specialist. I wasn't trained to deal with these dumbasses.

In biology I saw Bella stare at the back of Lauren's head. I wondered what new method of humiliation she was cooking up and feared for Lauren a little. This was going to be a tough time in Bella's life, and I imagined a punching bag would have been nice for her to have around. I made a mental note to suggest it to Carlisle.

After class she gingerly touched Lauren's shoulder, and they spoke in hushed tones before Lauren suspiciously followed her to the girl's bathroom. I winced for Lauren, but I'd saved her from Bella once before and it wasn't going to become my full-time job.

After the last bell rang I was looking for Lauren to make sure I didn't have to report a body when I saw Bella standing next to my car, looking exhausted and put out. I took careful steps towards her and waited for something monumental to happen. She smiled at me weakly, toeing the grass with her sneakers – no socks – and drumming her fingers against the hood of my car. "Can I get a ride home with you? Charlie said to stay at your place until he could come get me."

She sounded nothing like she'd sounded that first time, confident and cocky and so sure she was getting what she wanted that I had no room to even consider turning her down. She was meek, shy and utterly helpless, and some caveman instinct in me roared to life. "Sure."

She beamed at me, a dazzling smile that had me reeling. Fuck. She hadn't dazzled me in a while.

Hesitantly, she put on some Mars Volta for me in the car. I knew she wasn't into it, and the small gesture was surprisingly touching. It was the first time in months I'd listened to music. Somehow it seemed appropriate that it was with her.

"Do you think Alice will ever speak to me again?"

I nearly drove through a red light. Taking a moment to collect myself I looked at her, and she was blushing again. I had never seen her blush so much. "Alice isn't speaking to you?"

She shook her head, staring straight ahead.

I tried to be honest and think about what I knew of Alice. "Yeah, she will. She just needs to sort it out with Jasper first."

She nodded. "He's planning a big romantic gesture."

"Is he?" My lip twitched in amusement.

"He's going to propose."

"He's going to _what?!_"

Bella nodded, and I saw her own lips curling into a smile of her own. "He asked Rosalie to go ring-shopping with him. Of course the bitch called him a dumb fuck the whole time, but he told her he didn't care they were so young. If they waited it would just be delaying the inevitable."

I smiled at that. "So he really does love her?"

"Yeah, he just had a shit time showing it."

And just like that, we weren't talking about Alice and Jasper anymore.

We were silent by the time I pulled into my garage, and we were silent as we walked into the house. It was odd having her here, her oranges and flowers saturating everything in my kitchen and in my living room.

"Do you want me to order Chinese or something?" I was suddenly embarrassed by the emptiness of our fridge.

"You mind if I make something?"

I looked at her incredulously. "We don't have much."

"I'll manage."

I shrugged. "Knock yourself out."

She began moving around the kitchen, uncertainly at first then with growing confidence, filching that or the other and fiddling with the burners. She hummed as she worked, almost mindlessly, and I recognized the melody of an old Pixies song I had never liked. I watched her, enraptured by the ease and grace with which she worked. Wherever else she was clumsy – and I had seen her trip on nothing at all too often to deny it – she was at home in a kitchen. It was so out of whack with the rest of her, the bad ass free-loving-car-bashing-drug-binging girl that everyone saw, and I realized she must have been doing this for her whole life. Her mother wasn't around, and I certainly couldn't picture Chief Swan waltzing around a kitchen making anything edible. So it was all her, then.

"Tell me about your life growing up," I murmured, and she looked at me with surprise, as though she'd forgotten I was even there.

She shrugged. "There's not much to tell. I lived here my whole life. Only left once a year or so, to go see Renee."

"Did Charlie ever have any girlfriends?"

Her eyes hardened, almost reflexively, before I saw her take a deep breath and toss some noodles into a pot of boiling water. "No. He still has pictures of Renee all over the house, their wedding photos and everything else. His bedroom is almost exactly the way she left it. He's so hung up on her it makes me sick."

I nodded and tried to think analytically. Her father still loved the woman that had hurt her irreparably. She probably resented him for it. It was probably why they weren't very close against all odds. "How did he feel when your mom got remarried?"

She stiffened again, then ran her hands through her hair before wiping them against the thighs of her jeans. "He shut down for a bit when he first heard about it. After the wedding, I don't really know how he handled it. I wasn't there."

Right. Her first venture into Seattle's creepy and shady. The man had probably been devastated, losing the woman he still loved and, for all intents and purposes, losing his daughter in rapid succession.

"Will you tell me about your life?"

I heard the strain in her voice and recognized the pleading tone. The old Bella would have decked me for the first question, and she was trying to be open and honest with me. But it was hard on her. I took a deep breath. "Carlisle was never around much when I was a kid. I was such a little Momma's Boy." She laughed dryly, dropping some tomatoes into a pan to let them simmer. They smelled divine. "When she died, Carlisle kinda freaked I think. He didn't know much about being a dad. But he did the best he could." I smiled wryly. Yeah, I supposed he had. I'd never thought of it that way before, not really.

"How come you moved here?"

I shrugged. "Carlisle sold the old house, the one where he and Mom got married. I don't think he could have handled being in it anymore. He never dated after she died, ever, but then he came here and met Esme, so maybe it really was just the house that was holding him back."

She nodded, peeling some potatoes. "Maybe he needed the change."

She finished up dinner quickly – noodles in a sweet and sour tomato sauce with large chunky potato bits everywhere, weird but surprisingly delicious – and I had two full plates of the stuff. She watched me, amused. "You don't eat much around here?"

I shrugged, embarrassed by my gluttony. "Esme sends something to eat once in a while, but generally speaking cold cuts are the staple diet of the Cullen household."

She giggled, and I smiled despite myself at the sound.

"You seem so different to how you were when I first met you." The words were out before I had the chance to think about them, and I put my fork down gingerly.

Bella cleared her throat, twirling and retwirling the same noodle and not looking at me at all. "Is that a good thing?"

I was puzzled by her blushing. "Yeah, I think so. I mean, you're nicer. You smile and laugh a little. I like it." I blushed at the admission and was glad she wasn't looking at me.

She smiled, dropping the noodle to poke at a potato. "You never did answer my question from before, you know." I swallowed, knowing what was coming. "Is it too late for us?"

Well fuck, was it? "I don't know," I blurted. "What if you go to therapy and get your shit together and you don't even love me anymore? I mean fuck, you're beautiful and smart as hell and just so much fun and when you're nice like this I mean, what guy wouldn't want you?" I growled in an attempt to stem the word vomit but it came out regardless. "Even after all the most fucked up shit happened I still love you, and I know that whatever changes you make in yourself will just make me love you more. If I could love you with all your flaws and imperfections, I can't imagine what I'll feel for you when you're gentle and kind and sweet, and I already know you're all those things underneath the bullshit but now the rest of the world is going to know it too." I slammed my palm on the table, biting my lip to just shut up already, but I knew as the worlds tumbled out that they were true, that I was losing her and it wasn't going to be because I was too angry to forgive her, it was going to be because she wouldn't want me anymore, and a thousand other guys will want her in my place. "I'm nothing special. I'm notoriously saying the wrong things at the wrong times, I shut my own father out, I have no special skills or talents, I can't play any sports or instruments or do anything even remotely unique. And I hurt you."

I dropped my head, exhausted, too vulnerable to see the hurt or the anger or the disgust in her eyes. She must think I'm pathetic. See what happens when the inner pussy takes over?

"I love you." I was so shocked by the tenderness in her voice that I actually looked at her, and there was a quiet joy and peace in them I had never seen there before. "If you'll still want me, after I get my baggage sorted, it would be the most amazing thing for me." She wasn't blushing, and she wasn't crying. She was calm, stating it like a simple fact. "I want to be with you. I thought you'd never want to be with me again."

Blindly, a drowning man reaching at long last to comfort, I gripped her little hand in mine. It was warm from all that cooking, nothing at all like that night she'd come into my room and given me the best sex of my life. "I do. I will." It sounded like a vow, and somehow I meant it as one. I got a sudden glimpse, Bella in white, smiling up at me the way she was smiling now. Mine. Forever. Complete and whole and together. My Bella. Mine.

We ate in silence until her father picked her up, with her warm hand under mine, shy and unsure but relieved we were doing it together. After she left I sat in my room and played the Smiths CD she had made me hear so fucking long ago. It made me smile rather than cringe.

And I knew then that we would be alright.

**AN/**

**There's one more chapter after this. I'm getting emotional. A lot of you have told me you're attached to the characters, and I understand completely because I love these little guys like they were my family. Saying goodbye to them is hard, so please be patient while I churn out my farewells.**


	15. Chapter 15

**A/N:**

**Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer owns the plot and characters of Twilight, not to mention all the money it makes. I make nothing but fanfiction.**

**I have two confessions.**

**The first is that this chapter is short because it was supposed to just be a continuation of the last one but I ended up posting it in two unequal parts and so while the last chapter was probably my longest this one is my shortest.**

**The second confession I have is that I've been stalling. I'm still doing it, which is why you're still reading this. I hate goodbyes, and it almost feels like I'm putting them to sleep. You know, they're going to live on a farm, with bunnies and sheep. Yeah.**

**I know I keep saying it, but I don't say it enough: Twilightzoner is awesome. I made some seriously dumb ass mistakes (misspelled Emmett's name over and over for instance) and yet not once has she called me a dumb ass. In fact, I'm hoping I can take her up on that offer to keep her as my beta for all future endeavors. Because I'm greedy like that.**

**So without further stalling, I give you the finale.**

Chapter 15 - Epilogue: An Occasion aka "The Part That Comes After"

"It feels weird being here without you."

"I know, but it's temporary. You need to finish what you've started, for yourself _and_ for Charlie."

"I know," she huffed, but I knew I'd already won the argument. "I just miss you."

I smiled, tossing myself onto my bed and scrubbing my fingers through my hair. "I miss you, too. I'll see you soon. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and Christmas comes right after, and then it'll be spring semester and you'll be here."

Alice and Jasper were going to New York. Emmett and Rosalie were headed for LA. I was going to Dartmouth, and Bella was staying in Forks. Because no matter how many breakthroughs she made in therapy, how well she learned to cope with stress and anxiety and confrontation, or how big of a difference just a little bit of medication made, she wasn't ready. There had been slips. We had had fights.

"You promise your roommate is some fat guy and not a slinky blonde coed?"

I chuckled, shaking my head. "I promise."

She sighed, and I heard rustling over the line, like she was snuggling into her pillow. "I'm being unreasonable. My insecurity is irrational. I was just having a really good time all summer."

I smiled fondly. "I had fun, too, Bella."

Charlie had invited me over to dinner often enough, sometimes to watch a game, other times just for one of Bella's incredible fish dinners. I wouldn't say we bonded, but Bella would sit at the dinner table and try to narrate the life story of every piece of fish, or make up a running commentary during the games, turning each one into a soap opera and distracting us until I was smothering laughter and Charlie was huffing in annoyance. But I saw the small imperceptible twitches of his moustache and the twinkle in his eye, and I knew he enjoyed it. Time with Bella. Fun with Bella. I enjoyed it, too.

The summer had come whirling with bonfires and parties that Bella was only allowed to go to with me. I was subjected to a breath examination by Carlisle every time I went back home after one. The man killed my fun.

But Bella was just as restricted as I was, and most of the time that meant we sat together apart from the rest, sometimes talking about her therapy, sometimes talking about music, sometimes arguing about politics, sometimes comparing favorite Seinfeld episodes and sometimes not talking at all. Sometimes we held hands. Sometimes her face looked drawn and tired, and I knew she was fighting. But then she'd smile at me, dazzling and brilliant and so honest and sincere, and I knew she was winning.

"I don't want the fun to be over, Edward." She sounded small and scared, and I groaned.

"That's not fair, Bella. You know I'm not leaving you. I'll be back."

"I know. I'm projecting. Tanya says I can't help it."

I could hear the smugness in her voice, and I chuckled again. "Tanya doesn't know what hit her."

"Shut up." She sighed again, sounding more at ease. "Is it cold in New Hampshire?"

I shrugged, not wanting to sound as emotional as I felt. "Cold. Kinda weird. All uptight and boring."

"You'll be okay."

"I'll be okay."

"We'll be okay?"

I smiled, wanting so much to just be able to touch her in that moment. "We'll be okay."

Because she was fighting, and because I wasn't going to leave. Because she was winning, and I got to watch her come alive. Because at Alice and Jasper's magnificent fanfare of a wedding just the week before, I had kissed her under the oak behind the church, and it had never felt so right.

Because by spring, she was in Dartmouth, too.

***

_Five years later_.

***

"Where's my fucking cap?"

"How should I know where your fucking cap is?"

"Because you're the one who bought the fucking cap! What do you mean you don't know where it is?"

"What the fuck are you talking about? I didn't buy a fucking cap."

She turned to look at me, her eyes wide in horror. "You didn't buy me a fucking cap?"

Uh-oh.

She pressed her palms to the sides of her head as someone knocked on the door. I practically ran in my haste to open it. Someone had come to save me.

"I got you a cap." Rosalie shoved a plastic bag into my chest, and I let out a strangled sound of glee, throwing my arms around her.

"You're so good to me, step-sister."

She grunted. "Sure thing, step-brother."

"Get off of her already, Cullen," Bella hissed.

"Christ, Bella. You not giving him any, or what?" Rosalie joked.

"Why the fuck should I give him any when he keeps forgetting to buy my shit?" Bella snatched the bag out of my hand, and I rolled my eyes, following her to the bedroom. She was standing in front of the mirror which hung on the closet door, carefully placing the cap on her perfectly styled hair. She was wearing makeup today, something I hadn't seen her do often in all the time we'd been together. But of course, today was special. I slipped my hand into my pocket and fingered the small item I had there. Very special.

"You look beautiful," I said softly, and she turned her head to look at me, clearly surprised at the tenderness in my voice.

She blushed a scarlet that warmed my heart and smiled. "Thank you." And she did look so breathtaking, even in the goofy billowy gown and the silly cap. She went to the bed and picked up my suit jacket, helping me into it and pinning a carnation to the lapel. "You look very handsome." She kissed me softly when she was done, and we giggled as her cap bumped my forehead and all her hard work was wasted.

I took her hand in mine, linking our fingers together and leading her back to the entryway where Rose was giggling into Emmett's mouth. "Dude, stop sucking my sister's face in my house."

He chuckled and released her, wagging his eyebrows at me. "Fine, I'll just suck her face in the back seat of your car."

Rosalie rolled her eyes, but smiled at me and led Emmett out by the arm. "Hey Rose," I stopped her, and she turned around with questioning eyes. "You look perfect."

She smiled warmly. "Thanks, step-brother."

Bella squeezed my hand in approval. When Carlisle and Esme had first gotten hitched, Rosalie and I had faced serious turbulence. Bella and Emmett had indulged in scheme after scheme to try to force us into friendship, finally resorting to locking us into the rec room with canned food and stacks of Jet Li DVDs. Rosalie had drilled me about Bella, if I was treating her right, if I was going to fuck this up, that she'd kill me in my fucking sleep. I snapped at her that she didn't need to tell me this shit, I was all in and I wasn't backing out. Somehow, six hours into it, she started to listen. She seemed convinced. She gave me her approval. And then we watched a movie. Three hours later, Bella and Emmett came in to check on us and watched with wide-eyes the beginnings of siblinghood between the two of us. An unlikely outcome if I ever saw one, but there it was. She was a raving bitch, and it seemed I loved her for it.

Of course, that was over four years ago now. Rose and I had only gotten closer since then, which only made Bella happier. Which in turn made me happier.

As we got into the car, Rosalie squealed. "Turn it up, turn it up!"

Emmett groaned and kicked my seat. "Since when did you start listening to Hall & Oates?"

I shrugged, smiling. "You gotta know your roots, Emmett."

Bella snorted. "Damn right. You don't know jack shit about music if you can't appreciate the oldies. Isn't that right, Rose?"

Rosalie laughed, leaning forward to pick up one of my CDs from the arm rest. "Well, I guess all your musical education is finally paying off, Bella. This is a pretty good CD. I never took you for a Smiths fan, step-brother."

I shrugged and Bella laughed. "Call it sentimental."

"Jasper and Alice are meeting us there," Emmett announced, reading a text. "Alice says she's got a reservation someplace at eight, so we'll all leave together after the ceremony."

I nodded. They'd flown in from New York for this. When the five of us had graduated simultaneously last year, none of us got to see one another until the summer. But for Bella's graduation now, everyone was getting together. It was going to be strangely nostalgic, and strangely bittersweet, and if I knew Jasper, and I was certain I did, it would be a little bit awkward. But that was how we were, the six of us together. So modern and fucked and inappropriate. I smiled remembering the four hour phone call Alice and I had the night before, discussing all the details of tonight. She was the only one that knew of my plans.

As we got out of the car at the university, I put my hand in my pocket once again to touch the item I kept there.

"You okay?" Bella asked softly.

I looked down at Bella, smiling up at me, her brown eyes full of love, and I smiled back without having to think about it. "More than okay." I wrapped one arm around her waist and kissed her, restraining myself from devouring her mouth the way I wanted to. Because she was amazing -- bitter and angry and dysfunctional and sensitive and frightened and insecure and loving and loyal and protective and beautifully imperfect -- and she was mine.

I released her reluctantly when Emmett made gagging noises. She rolled her eyes and called him a monkey cock. Beautiful.

"Hey Bella, look who's here." Rosalie's voice indicated barely-contained amusement, and I followed her gaze to the leggy busty strawberry blonde in graduation gear trying to hide her black-hennaed hands under white silk gloves.

I chuckled as Bella smiled mischievously, cupping her hands around her mouth to call out. "Hey Kate!" The blonde stiffened. "Nice gloves!"

Everyone between the parking lot and the quad turned to stare, and Kate looked like she was on the verge of tears. I chuckled again, putting my arm around Bella's shoulder. "You ready to go, love?"

She nodded, beaming up at me. "I'm ready."

And she was. I was ready, too. We were both ready, because nothing ever felt as right as this and nothing ever would. We were wonky and foolish, and we were brave and stupid. I felt it so acutely as we walked towards her graduation ceremony, willing to face the world, Bella by my side and a small velvet box in my pocket, housing the ring I would put on her finger tonight.

We were ready.

So fucking ready.

_The End_

**AN/**

**A new story will be going up once I get some incubating done. I have a general idea of what I want the characters to be like (very different from this ditty) but no idea for an actual plot yet, and I'm told plot is actually important. Those of you who liked what you've read, please keep an eye on my profile for new shit.**

**Thank you and goodnight!**


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